If it was a whole decade ago it's hard to state how much the ecosystem has changed since then. Since 2014 they've released Community Editions of Visual Studio,

If it was a whole decade ago it's hard to state how much the ecosystem has changed since then. Since 2014 they've released Community Editions of Visual Studio, with a lot more useful features and less restrictive licensing than the old Express editions. But if you're used to writing Python in Notepad++ I'd skip VS entirely. You can install the dotnet SDK and just keep using Notepad++. Here's literally everything to write a CLI app in .NET 7: A csproj file: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk"> <PropertyGroup> <OutputType>Exe</OutputType> <TargetFramework>net7.0</TargetFramework> <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings> <Nullable>enable</Nullable> </PropertyGroup> </Project> A program.cs file: Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!"); Then open a terminal and navigate to the folder you put the files in and run `dotnet build`. Or just pass in the folder in the argument `dotnet build .\demo\demo.csproj`. Voila. A CLI executable is built in the .\bin\Debug directory.