My favourite free programming tools
Can you imagine how much a large software company would charge you for a code development system that supported programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F#, C++, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python, and allowed you to deploy your code onto Windows, Android, iOS or web servers? Such a tool sounds really expensive, doesn’t it? Well, as you’ve probably guessed it’s free, and the software I’m talking about is Visual Studio Community from Microsoft ( visualstudio.
com/vs/community). It’s a great mature platform, and for many programmers it provides everything they need without stumping up for the paid-for version of Visual Studio.
Sharing a similar name, look and feel – but not much else – is Visual Studio Code ( code.visualstudio.com), also from Microsoft. It’s a lean tool compared to the other Visual Studio offerings. This lack of bloat can be an advantage, especially for small teams and one-man bands – I find its fast turnaround can make the development process more productive.
As well as having excellent source-code editing facilities, with code completion and colouring support for pretty much any language, it also offers an interactive debugger and version control via integrated Git support. But the best thing about Visual Studio Code is that it’s available for Linux and Mac, as well as Windows.
My next free tool involves going outside the box slightly. I’m nominating the Raspberry Pi. Okay, so the hardware itself isn’t free (although the Pi Zero is astonishingly cheap – assuming you don’t get ripped off by resellers), but the ecosystem that surrounds it usually is. There are one or two paid-for tools, but they’re rare.
The most common Pi OS package, Raspbian, comes with pre-installed versions of Python, C, C++, Java, Scratch, Perl and Ruby. Via the magic of the “apt-get install” command, there’s also a whole world of software, tools and libraries available, and “git clone” gives you access to code on GitHub. The Pi is a great introduction to free programming.
With my web developer hat on, a real favourite free tool is CodePen ( codepen.io). It’s an online playpen where you can try out HTML, CSS and JavaScript mini-projects, and see instant, live results. It runs in any web browser, and can be a quick way to mock up things such as how the navigation buttons on a website will work. There are paid-for plans available, but for smaller projects the free version is perfectly adequate. A free tool for web developers is Google’s PageSpeed Insights
pcpro.link/272page). This will analyse your website as both a desktop and mobile user see it, and suggest code and configuration improvements to make the site load faster – quicker websites encourage people to stay longer; faster-loading sites are also ranked higher by search engines. There’s an API that you can use to automate the tests, perhaps hooking them into your CMS.
These are just my favourites. I’d love to hear about yours via letters@pcpro.co.uk.