Day by day, a revolution is happening in the computer world; existing technologies are becoming old and obsolete, opening up more space for newer ones. To learn and work on the modern technologies, you will need an updated IDE. Microsoft does the same with developers, most popular IDE named Visual Studio.
Microsoft released Visual Studio for developers in 1997. In 2002, it first received a flavor of .NET, and then it underwent a revolution with many new features in every major build. Along with Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft added support for .NET Core, which is a cross-platform, free, and open source managed software framework, such as .NET.
Visual Studio 2017, initially known as Visual Studio "15", was released on 7th March, 2017. It included a new installation experience, with which you will be able to install a specific workload or a component that you need to accomplish your work. As well as this, it also includes features such as .NET Core, and support for NGen, Editor Config, Docker, and Xamarin. Not only the Microsoft platforms, but Visual Studio 2017 also supports Linux app development, C/C++, Cordova, Python, Node.js, tooling for data science, and analytical applications.
As the industry is forwarding with latest technologies and IDE changes, it is not easy to cope with the latest changes. As a developer, it is very hard to learn everything that a new release brings.
In this book, we will cover most of the changes to move you one step ahead with the advancements. Ranging from the installation changes to new features introduced in the IDE, followed by features introduced in it, C# 7.0 will give you the base to start with Visual Studio 2017. Then, we will move on to learning how to build apps for Windows using XAML tools, UWP tools, and .NET Core; we will learn about NuGet, more on debugging and unit testing applications, cloud development with Azure, and source controls like Git/TFS.
The examples given in this book are simple, easy to understand, and provide you with a heads up to learn and master your skills with the new IDE, Visual Studio 2017. By the time you reach the end of this book, you will be proficient with deep knowledge about each of the chapters that it covers. You will enjoy reading this book with lots of graphical and textual steps to help you gain confidence in working with this IDE.
Choosing the right version of Visual Studio 2017 can be done as follows:
Visual Studio 2017 comes in three different editions and they are: Visual Studio Community 2017, Visual Studio Professional 2017, and Visual Studio Enterprise 2017.
The Visual Studio Community edition is a free, fully-featured IDE for students, open source developers, and individual developers. In all these cases, you can create your own free or paid apps using the Visual Studio 2017 Community edition. Organizations will also be able to use the Community edition, but only under the following conditions:
- In an enterprise organization, an unlimited number of users can use the Community edition, if they are using it in a classroom learning environment, academic research, or in an open source project. An organization is defined as an enterprise organization if they have more than 250 computers or $1 million annual revenue.
- In a non-enterprise organization, the Community edition is restricted to up to five users.
If you are a professional in a small team, you should go for Visual Studio Professional 2017. If you are a large organization building end-to-end solutions in a team of any size, and if the price does not matter to you, then Visual Studio Enterprise 2017 is the right choice as it includes all the features that it offers.
A point to note is that you can install multiple editions of Visual Studio 2017 side by side. So, feel free to install any or all editions based on your need.