Chapter 2. Setting Up the Environment

In any development project, it is vital to set up the right kind of development environment so that you can concentrate on the developing the solution rather than solving environment issues or configuration problems. With respect to .NET, Visual Studio is the defacto standard IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for building web applications in .NET.

In this chapter, you'll be learning about the following topics:

  • Purpose of IDE
  • Different offerings of Visual Studio
  • Installation of Visual Studio Community 2015
  • Creating your first ASP.NET MVC 5 project and project structure

Purpose of IDE

First of all, let us see why we need an IDE, when you can type the code in Notepad, compile it, and execute it.

When you develop a web application, you might need the following things to be productive:

  • Code editor: This is the text editor where you type your code. Your code editor should be able to recognize different constructs such as the if condition, for loop of your programming language. In Visual Studio, all of your keywords would be highlighted in blue color.
  • Intellisense: Intellisense is a context aware code-completion feature available in most modern IDEs including Visual Studio. One such example is when you type a dot after an object; this Intellisense feature lists out all the methods available on the object. This helps the developers to write code faster and easier.
  • Build/Publish: It would be helpful if you could build or publish the application using a single click or single command. Visual Studio provides several options out-of-the-box to build a separate project or to build the complete solution in a single click. This makes the build and deployment of your application easier.
  • Templates: Depending on the type of the application, you might have to create different folders and files along with the boilerplate code. So, it'll be very helpful if your IDE supports the creation of different kinds of template. Visual Studio generates different kinds of templates with the code for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, and Web API to get you up-and-running.
  • Ease of adding items: Your IDE should allow you to add different kinds of items with ease. For example, you should be able to add an XML file without any issues. And if there is any problem with the structure of your XML file, it should be able to highlight the issue and provide information to help you to fix the issues.
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