Visual Studio is the go-to development environment when it comes to making .NET apps, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the alternatives. JetBrains of Resharper fame has its own IDE, called Rider, which is pretty feature packed -- and still being improved upon. Unfortunately it hit a speed bump a few months back, running afoul of licensing issues with .NET Core.

Trying to develop a cross-platform app with a decent UI in any .NET language is hard. There's never been an optimal way to deploy everywhere and while attempts have been made to provide usable libraries, they're all works in progress. Even Microsoft's Xamarin.Forms is mobile-only. That, however, will change with version 3.0, with Microsoft promising support for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Over the last few years, .NET and indeed Microsoft, have been going through a transformation. It started with opening up .NET and the .NET Core project, followed by the acquisition of Xamarin and removing all licensing burdens from Mono. With all this growth, there was undoubtedly going to be some pain and that's come now in the form of .NET Standard.

iOS: An iPad might not be the apex of gadgets to program on, but there are times when convenience, portability and comfort outweigh the need for a full developer rig. For .NET coders, a slick new contender called Continuous could be the tablet IDE you've been waiting for.

.NET developers have probably heard about LINQPad, a handy "programmer's playground" where you can type C#, F# and Visual Basic .NET code into a scratchpad and quickly debug it. This can be a better alternative to, say, constant recompiling when tweaking logic.

So you've started playing around with Unity and discovered this "Mono" thing. Well, Mono things. MonoDevelop, the Mono Runtime, the Mono compiler. Mono, Mono, Mono. If you're completely in the dark as to the differences between these elements, well, it's time to learn.