visual studio .net OR KDE Kdevelop IDE?

I really want to master an IDE and vastly improve my programming skills so that I can develop commerical quality software products and work as a programmer. I am also learning *nix right now and noticed KDE comes with a integrated IDE that supports like 14 languages.

So which one should I really spend alot of time with familiarizing myself with? My strongest lanuguages are C/C++. Are there pros and cons to each IDE? From what I read, the KDE K develop is on par with visual studio .net, anyone know more?

It's not really which IDE at this stage, but which platform. An extremely large majority of C/C++ code is not platform independent, which means what you write for Linux won't run in Windows and vice-versa. If you're doing command line programming (e.g., no GUI), then you have a better chance of migrating the code.

So, do you want to write Linux applications or Windows?

The next popular IDE for Windows would be Borland and then maybe Code Warrior. Eclipse is moving towards a fully featured multi-language environment too. I used Borland many years ago and did some programming work for Code Warrior, but as an IDE goes, Visual Studio is the one to beat.

Considering todays commercial market, I would have to strongly suggest Visual Studio on the marketability it'll buy you. Just stay familiar with the *nix world so you'll be able to transfer your skills as an employer or the market demands.

I thought C/C++ which conformed to ansi standards was cross platform combatible? are the differences subtle like different function libraries available depending on the IDE you use, or are they fundamentally different?

I have the academic version of visual studio .net 2002(don't think much changed between it and .net 2003) I suppose if more people are using it than anything else I will learn that one. Now I just have to figure out what crystal reports is and what it does, I see it refered to alot in the literature.

If you're working from the command line (shell or DOS prompt), then a lot of your code will move across easily, though there still may be some differences with some libraries. If you're doing anything with a graphical user interface, you'll need the system libraries (X or MFC or .NET) to create the interface. This will not port from one platform to another.

Cross-platform portability is one of the reasons why Java is so popular.

so if I implement a sorting algorithm that works on some arbitrary input file, that would work on any platform but if I were to create a scientific graphing calculator which did symbolic manipulation similiar to the windows calculator but much more complicated... that wouldn't port over?