TL;DR:
Get Visual Studio community edition here: https://www.visualstudio.com/. It’s pretty cool.
About the IDE:
ASP.NET pretty much requires Visual Studio. You can get it free from Microsoft (the community edition anyway, which is all I’ve ever used). It’s a pretty self-explanatory installation, but you will eventually be prompted with a screen that asks you to select which add-ons you want. Honestly, I didn’t pay this screen too much attention. I just went through and selected the things I thought I might be remotely interested in some day.
As far as using the IDE goes, it’s pretty much like any of the other ones, at least on the surface. You have a folder explorer (technically, it’s a “solution” explorer, but I’ll touch on that later), you have a code editor (obviously), you have a package manager, you can customize the skin, etc, etc. It also supports git and shows you which files need to be committed and all that jazz. However, I would suggest keeping to the git bash shell for your commits and other commands, because it can get really confusing if you mix them with the VS (Visual Studio, I’ll be referring to it that way from now on because it’s easier to type) GUI commands.
Visual Studio is pretty cool:
Where VS get’s interesting is how it compiles and runs your ASP.NET MVC code. The short of it is that when you press Ctrl+F5, your application magically runs. The long of it is that when you press Ctrl+F5, all of the required code files that are in what feels like a gazillion different languages get compiled into an instance of IIS Express (Internet Information Services) which immediately hosts your MVC app (Did I mention that ASP.NET MVC is used for creating web apps?) on a random port and then opens a browser window that takes you directly to your app page.
The Solution Explorer:
As far as the file explorer goes, it’s actually called the Solution Explorer, and for good reason. Whenever you create a project in VS, you will have to go through a Wizard. That’s ok. This Wizard does a LOT for you. Depending on the type of project you’re going to create, you’re going to have a lot of configuration files and scaffolded code that is going to help you greatly. These files are created in a folder wherever you want BUT it also creates a .sln (solution) file that essentially holds meta data about your project that VS uses to put your project together. It makes more sense when you dig in and start coding with it.
NuGet:
Finally, let’s talk about the package manager. VS uses NuGet. There are a ton of packages that you can download and install into your VS project that will do just about anything you can think of. You can use the GUI in VS to install them or you can use a command line interface. It puts all the files you need in the proper place. It’s pretty nice. You can also use it to automatically update your databases when things change. I’ll cover that in a later post.
Wait, there’s more! But not today:
So I think that covers the highlights of the IDE that I think are important for people just starting out. There are some other pretty cool features that I didn’t cover here, but I’ll give them a nod when the time comes.
Thanks for reading! If you’ve got any questions, leave a comment or join the forums and lets talk about coding stuff because coding stuff is awesome.
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