14.1. Welcome to Visual Studio

For the remainder of your C# programming, you will be working in with the Visual Studio. This is the primary integrated development environment for C# programmers. The next few lessons will help you become familiar with Visual Studio as it is very different than replit.com.

14.1.1. Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE). An IDE is like a text editor on steroids. We can write and edit code and make use of additional features that enhance our coding experience. Visual Studio offers code completion hints, debugging, and even it’s own compiler. We’ll be using it throughout this course, so it’s time to get familiar with some of the basics.

Note

Visual Studio IDE is not the same application as the text editor called Visual Studio Code. If you already have VS Code installed on your machine, you will still need to install and configure Visual Studio.

14.1.2. .NET Core

.NET Core is a set of tools for developing software in a number of different programming languages, including C#. The tools together make what is known as a software development kit, or SDK. Unlike it’s predecessor, just called .NET or .NET Framework, .NET Core is open-source and available on several operating systems. The SDK provides the runtime environment and the virtual machine for compiling and running C# programs.

Starting with .NET 5, in November of 2020, the terms Core and Framework have been deprecated. There is now just one version of .NET that is based on .NET Core.

.NET Core also notably contains the base class libraries. This is the built-in code that takes care of common programming items, such as object types.

A summary of the relationship between the code you write in C# and tools provided by .NET Core:

  1. We write code in C#.

  2. The source code is compiled (like translating) into another intermediate language.

  3. The intermediate code is read by a runtime program included in the .NET SDK.

  4. The runtime environment translates the intermediate code into machine-readable language.

Fortunately for us, .NET Core can be installed along with Visual Studio IDE.

Before you finish the C# component of this class, you will use a framework called .NET Core MVC. This framework gives us the scaffolding necessary to create MVC programs (another concept we’ll cover) effectively and efficiently.

14.1.3. Windows Users vs. Mac Users

Windows users will setup their C# development environment with a community version of Visual Studio. Mac users need to download and install a different version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio for Mac. While the names of these two programs are very similar, the user-experiences are quite different.

An important note for this class: The content of this book is designed to inform both Windows and Mac users on the basics of web programming in C#. There are sometimes significant, and other times more minor, discrepancies between how to use the IDE tools provided in Visual Studio on Windows machines and Visual Studio for Mac. We will do our best to provide either instructions that are application neutral, or instructions that are tailored to the development experiences on both operating systems. There may be times when your C# project view will not look exactly like that in the book because you are on a different operating system and are therefore using a different Visual Studio application. The actions you take or buttons to click may be slightly different from what you see in the book.

14.1.4. Check Your Understanding

Question

True/False: .NET Core is the MacOS version of .NET Framework

  1. True

  2. False

Question

.NET Core contains:

  1. A C# compiler

  2. A virtual machine

  3. Visual Studio IDE

  4. C# class library