Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of:

1. a source code editor
2. build automation tools
3. a debugger

Depending on what language you are programming in you will have to install the correct IDE so that you can have access to the correct libraries and you can build your solution to run on the target system.

For more information please refer to the wikipedia entry.