Setting up your development environment

Before you start programming, you’ll need a code editor for C#. Microsoft has a family of code editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), which include:

• Visual Studio for Windows
• VS Code for Windows, Mac, or Linux
• VS Code for the Web or GitHub Codespaces

Third parties have created their own C# code editors, for example, Rider, which is available for Windows, Mac, or Linux, but does have a license cost. Rider is popular with more experienced .NET developers.

Choosing the appropriate tool and application type for learning

What is the best tool and application type for building apps and services with C# and .NET?

I want you to be free to choose any C# code editor or IDE to complete the coding tasks in this book, including VS Code, Visual Studio, or even Rider.

In this book, I give general instructions that work with all tools, so you can use whichever tool you prefer.

Using Visual Studio for general development

Visual Studio can create most types of applications, including console apps, websites, web services, desktop, and mobile apps.

Although you can use Visual Studio with a .NET MAUI project to write a cross-platform mobile app, you still need macOS and Xcode to compile it.

Visual Studio only runs on Windows 10 version 1909 or later, or Windows Server 2016 or later, and only on 64-bit versions. Version 17.4 is the first version to support native Arm64.

Using VS Code for cross-platform development

The most modern and lightweight code editor to choose from, and the only one from Microsoft that is cross-platform, is VS Code. It can run on all common operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and many varieties of Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ubuntu.

VS Code is a good choice for modern cross-platform development because it has an extensive and growing set of extensions to support many languages beyond C#.

Being cross-platform and lightweight, it can be installed on all platforms that your apps will be deployed to for quick bug fixes and so on. Choosing VS Code means a developer can use a cross-platform code editor to develop cross-platform apps.

VS Code has strong support for web development, although it currently has weak support for mobile and desktop development.

VS Code is supported on ARM processors, so you can develop on Apple Silicon computers and Raspberry Pi.

VS Code is by far the most popular integrated development environment, with over 75% of professional developers selecting it in the Stack Overflow 2025 survey, which you can read at the following link: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-dev-id-es.

What I used

To write and test the code for this book, I used the following hardware and software:

• Windows 11 on an HP Intel x64 laptop with Visual Studio, VS Code, and Rider.
• macOS on an Apple Silicon Mac mini (M1) desktop with VS Code and Rider.

I hope that you have access to a variety of hardware and software, too because seeing the differences on various platforms deepens your understanding of development challenges, although any one of the above combinations is enough to learn how to build practical apps and websites.

Rider and its warnings about boxing

If you use Rider and you have installed the Unity Support plugin, then it will complain a lot about boxing. A common scenario when boxing happens is when value types like int and DateTime are passed as positional arguments to string formats. This is a problem for Unity projects because they use a different memory garbage collector than the normal .NET runtime. For non-Unity projects, like all the projects in this book, you can ignore these boxing warnings because they are not relevant. You can read more about this Unity-specific issue at the following link: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/performance-garbage-collection-best-practices.html#boxing.

Deploying cross-platform

Your choice of code editor and operating system for development does not limit where your code gets deployed.

.NET 10 supports the following platforms for deployment:

• Windows: Windows 10 version 1607 or later, Windows 11 version 22000 or later, Windows Server 2012 R2 SP1 or later, and Nano Server version 2019 or later.
• Linux: Alpine Linux 3.22, Azure Linux 3.0, CentOS Stream 9 or 10, Debian 12 or 13, Fedora 42, openSUSE Leap 15.6, RHEL 9 or 10, SUSE Enterprise Linux 15.6, and Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, or 25.04.
• Android: API 21 or later is the minimum SDK target. Versions 12, 12.1, 13, 14, and 15.
• iOS and iPadOS: 18. iOS 12.2 is used as the minimum SDK target.
• Mac: macOS 14 or 15.

Windows ARM64 support in .NET 5 and later means you can develop on, and deploy to, Windows ARM devices like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 and similar devices.

Downloading and installing Visual Studio

Many professional Microsoft developers use Visual Studio in their day-to-day development work. Even if you choose to use VS Code to complete the coding tasks in this book, you might want to familiarize yourself with Visual Studio too.

If you do not have a Windows computer, then you can skip this section and continue to the next section where you will download and install VS Code on macOS or Linux.

Since October 2014, Microsoft has made a professional quality edition of Visual Studio available to students, open-source contributors, and individuals for free. It is called Community Edition. Any of the editions are suitable for this book. If you have not already installed it, let’s do so now:

1. Download the latest version of Visual Studio from the following link: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/.

2. Start the installer.
3. On the Workloads tab, select the following:
   • ASP.NET and web development
   • Azure development
   • .NET Multi-platform App UI development
   • .NET desktop development (because this includes console apps)
   • Desktop development with C++ with all default components (because this enables publishing console apps and web services that start faster and have smaller memory footprints)
4. On the Individual components tab, in the Code tools section, select Git for Windows.
5. Click Install and wait for the installer to acquire the selected software and install it.
6. When the installation is complete, click Launch.
7. The first time that you run Visual Studio, you will be prompted to sign in. If you have a Microsoft account, you can use that account. If you don’t, then register for a new one at the following link: https://signup.live.com/.
8. The first time that you run Visual Studio, you will be prompted to configure your environment. For Development Settings, choose Visual C#. For the color theme, I chose Light, but you can choose whatever tickles your fancy.
9. If you want to customize your keyboard shortcuts, navigate to Tools | Options…, and then select the Environment | Keyboard option.

Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts

In this book, I will avoid showing keyboard shortcuts since they are often customized. Where they are consistent across code editors and commonly used, I will try to show them.

If you want to identify and customize your keyboard shortcuts, then you can, as shown at the following link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/identifying-and-customizing-keyboard-shortcuts-in-visual-studio.

Downloading and installing VS Code

VS Code has rapidly improved over the past couple of years and has pleasantly surprised Microsoft with its popularity. If you are brave and like to live on the bleeding edge, then there is the Insiders edition, which is a daily build of the next version.

Even if you plan to only use Visual Studio for development, I recommend that you download and install VS Code and try the coding tasks in this chapter using it, and then decide if you want to stick with just using Visual Studio for the rest of the book.

Let’s now download and install VS Code, the .NET SDK, and the C# Dev Kit extension:

1. Download and install either the Stable build or the Insiders edition of VS Code from the following link: https://code.visualstudio.com/.

2. Download and install the .NET SDK for version 10.0 from the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/net/download.
3. To install the C# Dev Kit extension using the user interface, you must first launch the VS Code application.
4. In VS Code, click the Extensions icon or navigate to View | Extensions.
5. C# Dev Kit is one of the most popular extensions available, so you should see it at the top of the list, or you can enter C# Dev Kit in the search box.

6. Click Install and wait for the supporting packages to download and install.

Installing other extensions

In later chapters of this book, you will use more VS Code extensions. If you want to install them now, all the extensions that we will use are shown in Table 1.5:

Table 1.5: VS Code extensions used in this book

Managing VS Code extensions at the command prompt

You can install a VS Code extension at the command prompt or terminal, as shown in Table 1.6:

Table 1.6: Working with extensions at the command prompt

For example, to install the C# Dev Kit extension, enter the following at the command prompt:

code --install-extension ms-dotnettools.csdevkit

Understanding VS Code versions

Microsoft releases a new feature version of VS Code (almost) every month and bug-fix versions more frequently. For example:

• Version 1.107.0, November 2025 feature release
• Version 1.107.1, November 2025 bug fix release

The version used in this book is 1.108.2, the December 2025 bug fix release, but the version of Microsoft VS Code is less important than the version of the C# Dev Kit or C# extension that you install. I recommend C# Dev Kit v1.90.2 or later with C# extension v2.112.45 or later.

While the C# extension is not required, it provides IntelliSense as you type, code navigation, and debugging features, so it’s something that’s very handy to install and keep updated to support the latest C# language features.

VS Code keyboard shortcuts

In this book, I will avoid showing keyboard shortcuts used for tasks like creating a new file since they are often different on different operating systems. The situations where I will show keyboard shortcuts are when you need to repeatedly press the key, for example, while debugging. These are also more likely to be consistent across operating systems.

If you want to customize your keyboard shortcuts for VS Code, you can do so, as shown at the following link: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/keybindings.

I recommend that you download a PDF of keyboard shortcuts for your operating system from the following list:

• Windows: https://code.visualstudio.com/shortcuts/keyboard-shortcuts-windows.pdf
• macOS: https://code.visualstudio.com/shortcuts/keyboard-shortcuts-macos.pdf
• Linux: https://code.visualstudio.com/shortcuts/keyboard-shortcuts-linux.pdf

Using other project templates

When you install the .NET SDK, there are many project templates included. Let’s review them:

1. At a command prompt or terminal, enter the following command:

   dotnet new list
   

2. You will see a list of currently installed templates, including templates for Windows desktop development if you are running on Windows, the most common of which are shown in Table 1.7:

Table 1.7: Project template full and short names