An alternative software to Visual Studio for x86 Assembly programming on Windows 10

You can use any text editor you want, plus NASM and a linker. (NASM has better-designed syntax than MASM which comes with visual studio, and good error messages that explain what it doesn't like when you write an instruction that can't assemble.) There are other good free assemblers, too.

Then you have your choice of debugger. Multiple GUI debuggers exist; some front-ends for GDB, others native Windows ones. I don't use Windows so hopefully someone else will say something about that.

See also

• Hello World using NASM (and GoLink) on x64 64 bit Windows
• Hello world in NASM with LINK.EXE and WinAPI
• Setting up an assembler on 64-bit Windows
• https://stackoverflow.com/tags/x86/info the tag wiki has a section on debuggers at the bottom, but mostly just GDB on GNU/Linux and Visual Studio's debugger on Windows. The rest of it is full of useful links to manuals, docs, and tutorials which will be useful once you have a dev environment set up and are trying to actually do anything.

Those are all 64-bit examples. A dev env that can create 64-bit binaries can also create 32-bit binaries.

Alternatively to NASM you can try my assembly tutorial. You will need a plain-text editor and €ASM (no linker is neccessary) and you can create programs for 16, 32 or 64-bit Windows and Linux.

There is an alternative that can sometimes be much more convenient: inline assembly in Delphi (for which there is a free Community Edition available).

This is great for learning assembly programming because you can code all the 'surroundings' for your assembly-language fragments (test setup, visualisation, benchmarking, threading ...) in an easy to learn high-level language. Plus, you have everything you need in a single IDE, including debugger.

Last but not least, you can step through the machine code for any Pascal/Delphi code you have, in order to see how the compiler does things, for inspiration. The Delphi compiler isn't exactly the brightest bulb on the planet - meaning you will see inexplicable redundancies and inefficiencies in the machine code that no self-respecting C/C++ compiler (or assembly programmer) would dream of getting caught with - but it gets the job done.

Free Pascal and/or Lazarus might offer similar functionality. I don't know them because over the last 30 years I've always had a reasonably current professional edition of Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal or Delphi at my disposal, and so I never needed the free Open Source alternatives.