Appendix B: Setting up your development environment
To follow along with the code samples in this book and to run the code in the supplementary code samples repo (github.com/dmetzgar/dotnet-in-action-samples), you only need two things: a .NET SDK (6 or later) and a text editor.
There are many editors for .NET available, including downloadable IDEs and online editors. Since .NET has been around a long time, some of these editors may not support the latest .NET versions. Unless covering a specific feature, this book will stick to what can be done with only a simple text editor (think notepad or vi). Investing in a full-featured IDE with a debugger, auto-completion, code analysis tools, etc. will help immensely but is not a requirement.
Here are some free editors to try:
- Visual Studio 2022 Community edition - Windows-only, https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
- Visual Studio Code - cross-platform, https://code.visualstudio.com/
- Atom - cross-platform, https://atom.io/
There are two great editors available for purchase:
- Visual Studio 2022 Professional and Enterprise editions - Windows-only, https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
- JetBrains Rider - cross-platform, https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/
Some editors I don’t recommend are:
- scriptcs
- Eclipse aCute
- #develop (SharpDevelop)
- Monodevelop - replaced by Visual Studio for Mac
- slickedit
These projects have not kept up with .NET or may have been abandoned in favor of writing plugins for Visual Studio Code or Atom.