Well Microsoft has realized that the apart from being an excellent platform, the major reason for the success of Java is that it is community friendly - most of the Java stuff is free for developers and thus attracts huge newbies. There was one thing which Microsoft always boasted about - its IDE - THE VISUAL STUDIO. Inspite of being very expensive, it has become so powerful that everyone was willing to buy.(ofcourse those who are loyal to ms)
With advent of Eclipse, things changed a bit more than what one has expected. Earlier the IDE market for Java was ruled by Borland whose Delphi is also very popular amongst Windows Developers. But again Borland Studio wasnt free(there is a free developer version,limited). Eclipse is the best IDE for Java, but what i feel is that it really needs a high end machine( my machine is 733Mhz P-III with 256MB SD RAM and I run .NET Studio successfully, but it always makes me dull when i run Eclipse - somehow i might be doing somehting wrong) Anyway that is a different story, but Eclipse is a bigggggggg hit. There are thousands of plugins for Eclipse, which can all be used to extend the IDE to unimaginable extent. NetBeans is also getting popular, with its free community edition being released. Anyway this is not a Java blog, so let me get back to the topic.
Microsoft has taken a whole new strategy to get a fair share of developer market through its .NET 2.0. Apart from being the best release by Microsoft so far, another cool offer from Microsoft is their Express Editions. There has been a lot of publicity and encouragement from Microsoft for developers to try their Express Editions. Well, just for information for any IDE, there are usually numerous versions - Professional. Enterprise, Express,etc. Express Editions are free for download and there are three Express Editions as of now. Visual Basic Express Edition, Visual C# Express Edition and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. All of these are free for download, for almost another 10 months. They have almost all the features that a normal developer needs or uses in Visual Studio 2005. Some of the advanced features might be missing, but frankly inspite of using Visual Studio .NET since two years almost everyday, I feel i dont even use 5% of the features .NET provides. The major use for an IDE atleast for a normal developer like me is Intellisense and Debugging. Very soon, i shall add an article about Debugging, and how it makes developers life very easy to make their applications error-free.
Anyway for those who wish to try .NET and are scared to get VS 2005, can just download the express editions and get most of the .NET features at your place; then try out. They are each somewhere near 400-500 mb.
Well before i end just let me tell you, that from tomorrow, i shall a daily funda to my blog. The funda would have few curious questions about .NET/C#/Vb.NET and answers to them. And hey, as you have already visited my blog, just click over the Ad that is placed on the top of this page- that fetches me some money dude!!