C++ development environment and compiler which one?

[PeriscopeDepth]

Originally Posted by XabbaRus

Purely Windows environment...

I'm learning C++ to help me out in my career since I am studying Electrical Engineering and when I start the degree course I will be doing electronics too..

Well, there's certainly nothing wrong with using Visual Studio for your purposes. It's pretty good as far as IDEs go, and the compiler is good as well.

That being said...
For C/C++ stuff without a huge amount of classes, an IDE can often be used as a crutch by a student. They abstract some of the compiler/linker stuff away into the build button and you really should not need autocompletion at first, you should learn compiling from the terminal and using the STLs. IDEs have their place. I do some work for a company whose project consists of thousands of lines of code, it would be confusing for me without an IDE. At the majority of the student level, I question the benefit of an IDE.

And depending how much CS your school makes you take/how much you think you will actually use it in the real world it may be beneficial to NOT use an IDE, or the MSFT toolset at all. I'm about halfway through my CS degree and I know the local university here makes you ssh into a *nix server and do your development in their environment which consists of: the command line compiler, vim/emacs, and your assortment of *nix bash commands. More businesses than you think work this way as well, and it's becoming more common with a lot of the newer interpreted languages that make an IDE seem silly (Ruby, Python). It is a really good idea to become comfortable working with what the Unix console offers.

I will leave my personal feelings about MSFT's development stack out of this.

Sorry if that was long winded

PD