Hey Everyone,
I'm sorry for such a basic question but I'm new to Laserfiche and the SDK. So to use the SDK I need to have an IDE such as Visual Studio installed?
An IDE is not strictly necessary. If you really wanted to you could write your code in Notepad and launch the compiler from the command line. Virtually everyone who uses the .Net SDK will be using Visual Studio, and there are free version available so there's no reason not to.
Well, technically there are other IDE's you can use with .NET to build and compile, but I would certainly suggest Visual Studio. :)
There is also very limited java connectivity but the vast majority is through .NET.
The new community edition of Visual Studio is full featured, and is completely free for commercial use if you meet certain criteria for the size of your company.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx