Quote from: bob123 on July 25, 2018, 11:41:20 AM

Bitcoin core is written in C, so any IDE / text editor + compiler would be enough.

For solidity, you can take a look here (https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/).
Multiple plugins for several IDE's are available, according to the docs, remix(https://remix.ethereum.org/), a browser based IDE, is suggested for developing smart contracts.
However, you can find an solidity extension for visual studio here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ConsenSys.Solidity.

This is a big fat lie or misbelieve.

Bitcoin is carefully modified to only work in:

C++
Boost
Latest GNU C++ compiler.

Any other development environment will fail miserable with all kinds of compiler errors. (For the clueless: The reason for these compiler errors is bitcoin uses latest c++ features as well as latest boost which again uses latest c++ features and even specific gnu c++ compiler features, other compilers simply don't support these c++ features and are lagging behind or have other differences).

These delibrate code modifications have resulted in a tight coupling of bitcoin to "open source/linux/gnu" stuff.

This is an insult to Satoshi who used Windows/Visual Studio in first versions and could be a reason why he left the project.

Ask yourself the following question if you are a Visual Studio developer or any other IDE developer ?!

Would you quite the project you are working on if IDE changed to something you have no experience with and ditch years of IDE experience ?

Getting to learn an IDE the ins and outs takes a lot of time.