A few months ago, Microsoft announced a major change in the licencing for its premier software development environment Visual Studio. Although you still need to pay several hundred dollars if you intend to use it for commercial purposes, the full product is available for free for non-commercial use. And even for small commercial projects too, in some cases.

So if you want to write programs using the same development environment that pretty much all professional coders use, check out Visual Studio 2015 Community (which is the moniker given to the free version). You'll find it at www.visualstudio.com but be aware that the full download is considerably larger than the 0.2 MB installer that you initially download. So take care if you're on a limited or metered internet connection.