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Hello, C#! Welcome, .NET!
In this first chapter, the first goal is setting up your development environment to use Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code, or JetBrains Rider.
Throughout this book, I will use the namesVisual Studio,VS Code, andRider to refer to these three code editors, respectively.
The other goals are understanding the similarities and differences between modern .NET, .NET Core, .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard; creating the simplest application possible with C# 13 and .NET 9, using various code editors; and then discovering good places to look for help.
My style of writing ensures that you can get started from my book and then switch to online documentation and other online resources, like videos, blogs, and forums, which are the main ways that developers like to learn, as shown at the following link:https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/developer-profile#learning-to-code.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- Introducing this book and its contents
- Setting up your development environment
- Understanding .NET
- Building console apps using Visual Studio
- Building console apps using VS Code
- Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
- Looking for help
Introducing this book and its contents
Let’s get started by introducing you to the code solutions, structure, and content of this book.
Getting code solutions for this book
The GitHub repository for this book has solutions that use full application projects for all code tasks and exercises, found at the following link:
https://github.com/markjprice/cs13net9
After navigating to the GitHub repository in your web browser, press the. (dot) key on your keyboard, or manually change.com to.dev in the link to convert the repository into a live code editor based on VS Code, called GitHub Codespaces, as shown inFigure 1.1:
Figure 1.1: GitHub Codespaces live-editing the book’s GitHub repository
Warning! When you access a repository using GitHub Codespaces, its GitHub Repositories extension will attempt to download the repository’s index. By default, the maximum size can be up to 50MB but the repository exceeds this limit, so you will see the following warning message:Repository exceeds download size limit! Continuing with partial text services. You c