A friend of mine dropped me an email that asked the following:

So, I’ve been thinking more and more lately that I should make some better use of my spare brain cycles and train time by learning some coding. Do you have any recommendations for where a total coding newbie with no money and no copy of VS should start?

So I thought I would answer in a series of blog posts.  This is part 1.

The first thing is no money does not mean that you can’t have a copy of Visual Studio

The first thing to do is grab a copy of Visual Studio Express Edition.  These are supprisingly capable cut down versions of the real Visual Studio 2005.

Go for Visual Basic or C# - don’t think C++ or J# are particularly good places to start learning code.  Either is fine.  Really. 

Also, Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition is available in Beta 2 at the time of writing.  Visual Studio 2008 is awesome, but again not the best place to start imho.

Then grab Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server Express

Also, if you think MCP Certification is on the cards, each MS Press training kit comes with a 90-day copy of Visual Studio Professional.

UPDATE:  There are some additional downloads to consider:

• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions Service Pack 1
• Visual Studio 2005 Update for Windows Vista
• SQL Server Books Online Update (May 2007).  NB: These are updated a couple of times a year.
  

The second thing is no Visual Studio does not mean no .NET programming

#develop, or SharpDevelop is a free, open source development tool for C#, VB.NET and Boo.

It has a couple of limitations, but can be had for a tiny 8.2Mb download and dosen't carry some of the weight of Visual Studio while still keeping some of the look and feel.

Still have some spare bandwidth?

Grab the Windows SDK.  It's probabbly a bit above the beginner level but it represents an execllent reference to what is happening under the hood when you come to need to know.

Grab FxCop (NB: you may have grabbed this as part of the Windows SDK).  FxCop is a tool that looks at your programs and compares them to a set of rules for programming on the .NET framework.  This is a little bit of an advanced topic, but also is a really valuable learning tool for avoiding bad coding habits.

FxCop 101:  The default is to check your code against all the rules.  As a beginner you probabbly don't want this.

Source code control is an important practice.  Even for a single guy on a train.

For source code control I would recommend going with SourceGear Vault which is free for a single named concurrent user.  It's really easy to install and get going.

Unlike SourceSafe, Vault is backed with a SQL Server database for better performance and backup support, and also runs over SSL and can run over the internet.  Additionally it supports an Edit-Merge-Commit usage pattern in addition to SourceSafe’s Checkout-Change-Commit usage pattern – but that is a bit of an advanced topic so don’t get too distracted.  Just know that it’s there for later.

What Else?  I'd love to hear from anyone via comments here on this topic.  What other bits should people go and get for programming on day one.

Listening To:  DAT318 Applied ADO.NET Entities from Tech.Ed '07.