SciTE is a code editor. It has syntax highlighting, automatic suggestions and completion, matching brackets, and often a simple way to run your code in the sense of: Start the compiler, start the interpreter, start another program that handles debugging, etc. Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (always called IDE). A code editor is part of an IDE, but an IDE offers much more functionality. The source code editor, the interpreter/compiler, the debugger are all integrated as part of the same program. Visual Studio also helps you with file management. There is a whole list of C# language features and .NET libraries to be named which would be much less convenient if Visual Studio did not support them. A prime example of that is the way you can consume SOAP services with WCF. Building a service reference like that would take you about 30 minutes in SciTE if you knew what you were doing, in Visual Studio even a monkey can do it in 10 seconds. Purely as a code editor, Visual Studio is better than SciTE. Mainly because of IntelliSense. All in all, Visual Studio is much preferred over SciTE because it helps your workflow greatly. The downside is you won't understand all things under the hood (like very useful command line arguments on the compiler), but some would argue that you don't have to.