Appendix A. Development environment setup
This appendix describes how to set up a development environment for working with the code you write throughout this book. The development environment has five parts:
- An IDE— You can choose between using Visual Studio 2015 or newer, Visual Studio Code, ATOM, or JetBrains Rider. Visual Studio 2015 is Windows-only, whereas the other three work on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
- dotnet—You need the dotnet command-line tool.
- Yeoman ASP.NET generator— You need this to create ASP.NET Core projects. If you use Visual Studio, you can create projects through Visual Studio instead, but throughout this book you’ll use Yeoman. Visual Studio and Yeoman project templates are similar, but not identical.
- Postman— You need a tool for making HTTP requests. There are many such tools, including cURL and Fiddler; but I recommend Postman, which I find easy to use and which works on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
- SQL database— On Windows, you can use SQL Server (which you’ll do throughout the book); but if you prefer, you can use another SQL database, such as PostgreSQL.
I’ll walk you through installing and getting up and running with the development environment in the following sections.
There are four IDEs you can use with this book’s code. Which one you choose is a matter of taste; all of them work fine with everything in the book. I, for one, have been switching back and forth among all four while developing the code for the book.