Windows as my Primary Development Environment

All of my recent programming work has been done on the Windows platform.  And a result, I’ve decided to move my development tool set over to Windows.  It was not an easy decision as this meant that I would not be using Linux as much as I have in the past.  But the thought of switching between operating system (I have a dual-boot system with Ubuntu and Windows 7) was just not something I wanted to keep doing.  I know that I could have used a virtual machine on Windows 7 to emulate Linux, but the experience was just not the same. I’ll keep the dual-boot for those times when I do truly need to go and work on a native Linux platform.

In the mean time, below you’ll find my new setup for all the things I’ve been working on for the past few months (and will continue to use in the near future):

• Visual Studio 2010 – The main IDE for .NET programming.  Most of my recent work has been with ASP.net though I did recently build a simple Windows Form based application for a project I am working on.  I have been meaning to do some Win32 programming with C/C++ and now with my brand new (and quite powerful laptop) I’ll finally be able to use this IDE to build some tools that I’ve been meaning to work on.
• Eclipse – My recent work with building my first Android Application has lead me to use this old favorite IDE.  Most likely I’ll only use this for Android development and some other Java related projects I have lying around.
• Netbeans – My choice IDE for web development.  The HTML, Javascript and PHP support is just so much better in this IDE when compared to what Eclipse has to offer.  This too was  a painful decision to make as Eclipse is and continues to be one of favorite IDE’s to work with.
• xampp - This will allow me to run apache, mysql and other open source tools that can allow me to play around with PHP.  This was a main reason why I used Linux.  I’ve just set this up and so far I am liking what I am seeing.  I am looking forward to continue using this for my future development tasks with open source projects. As for the performance hit, there really is not any noticeable one.  This makes me quite a happy camper.
• cygwin – A Linux Command shell emulator.  I use this on a regular basis as I use it to remote connect to my website thru ssh to make changes to it.  In addition, I use this to use git (for source control management).  I am going to use this environment to work with other programming languages; most notably python and perl which I’ve been itching to spend some time with learning.