About Visual Studio

Visual Studio is the premier IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that Microsoft provides for developing applications in the .NET Framework. Previously, Microsoft targeted the corporate audience and charged for licenses for this software.

Starting with the 2015 version, Microsoft released a free edition called Community Edition which has the same features as the Professional edition that was previously charged for. Additionally, there is an Enterprise edition which contains features for managing virtual environments and a Test edition geared towards automated testing. The vast majority of projects will find Community Edition is more than sufficient.

The videos in this course depict the 2015 version, but all code and projects are compatible with 2017 (we are teaching the basics, and those do not change between versions).

Downloading the Latest Edition of Community Edition

The easiest way to get started with Visual Studio is to open a browser and navigate to http://www.visualstudio.com (Links to an external site.). On this site, there are several download links to various versions of Visual Studio. The "Download Visual Studio" button has a "community 2017" option that should be chosen.

The download link will download a small web installer file which, when launched, will run you through the installation wizard. Select the features you would like to install in the wizard. When installing Visual Studio 2017 select the Universal Windows Platform Development, ASP.NET and Web Development, Data Storage and Processing, and .NET Core cross-platform Development workflows. You may also want to install Mobile development with .NET if mobile applications interest you.

Launching Visual Studio for the First Time

When you launch Visual Studio, it will prompt you to sign in using a Microsoft account. It is not necessary to sign in, but we recommend creating an account with Microsoft if you do not already have one. Having a Microsoft account allows you to sync settings across devices and connect to other services, such as Azure hosting. This is not necessary to complete the course.

Next, the software will prompt you to use hosting. You may choose to do this, but it is beyond the scope of this course, so choose the “Not now, maybe later” option to skip that step.

Finally, Visual Studio will prompt you to choose your development settings and your color theme. In this course, we will be using the Blue color theme, so choose this one if you would like your IDE to match the examples in color and style. You can always change the color theme in the Settings menu later. For your development settings, choose Visual C#. This selection prioritizes the project creation menus and some other minor user interface changes geared towards programming in C#. If you wish to reset your settings later you can do so in the Import and Export settings wizard found in the Tools menu of Visual Studio.

Visual Studio for Mac

Recently Microsoft released a version of Visual Studio for Mac. While the videos in this course do not cover the Mac version, it is close enough that once configured you should be able to complete the course materials.