Double-click on DartEditor.exe to open the editor. Navigate to File | New Project or click on the first button below the menu (Create a new Dart Project...). Fill in an application name (for example, dart1) and choose the folder you want the code file to be created (make a folder such as dart_apps to provide some structure; you can do this while using the Browse button). We will leave the Console application – A simple command-line application selection.

With these names, a dart1 folder is made as a subfolder of dart_apps and a main.dart source file is created in dart1\bin with the following code (we'll explain pubspec.yaml and the packages folder in one of the following examples). For now, replace its contents with the following code:

void main() {
  print("Hello, World!");
}

Here, we see immediately that Dart is a C-syntax style language, using { } to surround code and ; to terminate statements. Every app also has a unique main() function, which is the starting point of the application.

This is probably the shortest app possible, but it can be even shorter! The void keyword indicates (as in Java or C#) that the method does not explicitly return an object (indeed print only produces output to the console), but the return types can be left out. Furthermore, when a function has only one single expression, we can shorten this further to the following elegant shorthand syntax:

main() => print("Hello, World!");

Now, change the printed string to "Becoming a Dart Ninja!" and click on the green arrow button (or press Ctrl + R) to run the application. You should see something like the following screenshot (where the Files, Apps, and Outline items from the Tools menu were selected):

The Dart Editor

You have successfully executed your first Dart program!

Near the bottom of the screen, we see our string printed out together with the exit code=0 message meaning that all went well.

The Files and Apps tabs are useful for browsing through your applications and for creating, copying, moving, renaming, and deleting files. The Outline tab now only shows main(), but this tool will quickly become very useful because it provides an overview of the code in the active file.

Because this was a command-line application, we could just as easily have opened a console in our dart1 folder and executed the dart main.dart command to produce the same output as shown in the following screenshot:

A Dart console application