How do I create a free C# development environment

For personal projects I cannot use my work-licence of Visua开发者_运维技巧l Studio Professional at home.

Visual Studio Express just seem less appealing than the professional edition, what are my alternatives except notepad?

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MonoDevelop and SharpDevelop are only two options, though even the Express edition of Visual Studio seems to have more features (and is more familiar to those using the Pro/Ultimate editions).

A number of programming text editors have C# syntax highlighting and you can invoke the compiler with key bindings (that you will need to configure yourself), though a dedicated IDE would make a better experience. Notepad++ is one such editor.

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Notepad++? :)

More seriously though, there are free C# IDE's out there, such as SharpDevelop however I have always preferred Visual Studio myself.

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One open source alternative is SharpDevelop.

Edit: And as Kyle pointed out, I too prefer Visual Studio above anything else.