When you're talking Linux development tools, chances are you're talking about decades-old programming editors like vi and EMACS. These are fine for an older generation of programmers, but today's developers, weaned on Microsoft Visual Studio want integrated development environments.

Eclipse is a new world for Microsoft® Visual Studio® developers, and getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Learn about these and other differences between the two environments, so that you can begin to feel at home with Eclipse.

Mono Tools lets Visual Studio developers use the Microsoft IDE for cross-platform application development

Being able to create cross-platform applications is becoming more and more important for developers. Here you will see where some of the basic Visual Studio C++ options are under Linux and Eclipse.

"One of the lines on my list of things I can do in order to make progress on my book is to move my Drupal development environment from Eclipse to Emacs, as immersion would no doubt give me plenty of things to tweak and describe. When you use something every day, you notice the rough edges. With Emacs, you can sand those edges down.

In the past, I've always shied away from integrated development environments (IDEs), but I recently had a strong enough motivation to finally learn how to use Eclipse - one of the most widely-used free software IDEs available today.

A survey from the Eclipse Foundation, which oversees development of the open source Eclipse IDE, shows that 32.7 percent of respondents use Linux as their primary desktop development system, up almost 6 points from 2009. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro among Eclipse developers.

Almost three years ago, developerWorks published "Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse," which introduced some of the features found in the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse. Current at the time was V0.5. We revisit that tool in this article. Today, RDT is called Aptana RadRails and is available as a plug-in for Aptana Studio or Eclipse.

An integrated development environment (IDE) (sometimes known as an integrated design environment or integrated debugging environment) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to programmers for software development.