1. Topics of discussion
2. Installing Visual Studio

1. Topics of discussion

In this tutorial, we are going to install Visual Studio and prepare ourselves for writing code. So, let's have some fun.

2. Installing Visual Studio

The only thing we need is what is known as an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE for short). An IDE is a program that allows you to write code in a programming language and then it will help you transform that code into an app that can be run.

For this course, we are going to use Visual Studio 2019, the Community Edition version. You can download and install it from here. There are no special things to select or deselect here, so just go for the defaults.

Once the installation is completed, you can open Visual Studio and select Create a new Project. Search for Console App and click Next. You can select either .NET Core or .NET Framework, the code we are going to discuss will work either way. Enter whatever name you want (like OOP) and select a folder to place the solution in. I use D:\Projects as my solution location. Click Create and you are good to go.

When dealing with C# projects, it's important to understand that in the past, these projects could be executed in a Windows environment only. That has since changed in recent times. In our case, we will be mostly focusing on programs that are compiled into .exe files. The compilation process is the process that takes everything you wrote in your IDE and transforms it into something that can be executed on the computer you're running said program on. In the case of C# projects, you'll mostly be compiling your projects into either .dll files or .exe files.

Executable files (.exe) are going to run directly, while projects compiled into .dll files need to be run inside a container, usually IIS.

And that about covers it for this tutorial as well. In the next one, we are going to discuss the principles of OOP. See you then.

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