[mintyfresh]

While I'm of the opinion that tinkering away with a Raspberry Pi is inherently a great thing, developing for a minimalistic piece of nearly open source hardware running an open source OS using software as bloated and proprietary as Visual Studio really rubs me the wrong way.

[sysprogs]

In fact, that purely depends on your goals. If you're just tinkering around, the text editor or something simple like CodeBlocks or KDevelop is probably fine. If you are doing a bigger project where productivity becomes a must and spending time on doing the same routine things over and over becomes annoying - an IDE as powerful as Visual Studio can be a really good investment...