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...

Visual Studio offerings

There are different versions of Visual Studio 2015 available to satisfy the various needs of developers/organizations. Primarily, there are four versions of Visual Studio 2015:

• Visual Studio Community

• Visual Studio Professional

• Visual Studio Enterprise

• Visual Studio Test Professional

System requirements

Visual Studio can be installed on computers running Windows 7 Service Pack 1 operating system and above. You can get to know the complete list of requirements from the following URL:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-system-requirements-vs.aspx

Visual Studio Community 2015

This is a fully featured IDE available for building desktops, web applications, and cloud services. It is available free of cost for individual users.

You can download Visual Studio Community from the following URL:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx

Throughout this book, we will be using the Visual Studio Community version...

Installing Visual Studio Community

Follow the given steps to install Visual Studio Community 2015:

1. Visit the following link to download Visual Studio Community 2015:

   https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx

   

2. Click on the Download Community 2015 button. Save the file in a folder where you can retrieve it easily later:

   

3. Run the downloaded executable file:

   

4. Click on Run and the following screen will appear:

   

There are two types of installation—default and custom installation. The default installation installs the most commonly used features and this will cover most developer use cases of the developer. Custom installation helps you to customize the components that you want to install:

1. Click on the Install button after selecting the installation type.

2. Depending on your memory and processor speed, the installation will take 1 to 2 hours to install.

   

3. Once all the components are installed, you will see the following Setup Completed screen:

   

Installing ASP.NET 5

When we install the Visual Studio Community 2015 edition, ASP.NET 5 will be installed by default. As the ASP.NET Core application runs on top of ASP.NET 5, we need to install ASP.NET 5. There are a couple of ways to install ASP.NET 5:

• Get ASP.NET 5 from https://get.asp.net/

  

• Another option is to install from the New Project template in Visual Studio

This option is a bit easier as you don't need to search and install.

The following are the detailed steps:

1. Create a new project by selecting File | New | Project or using the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + N:

   

2. Select ASP.NET Web Application and enter the project name and click on OK:

   

3. The following window will appear to select a template. Select the Get ASP.NET 5 RC option as shown in the following screenshot:

   

4. When you click on OK in the preceding screen, the following window will appear:

   

5. When you click on the Run or Save button in the preceding dialog, you will get the following screen asking for ASP.NET 5 Setup. Select the checkbox...

Project structure in ASP.NET 5 application

Once ASP.NET 5 RC1 is successfully installed, open the Visual Studio, create a new project and select the ASP.NET 5 Web Application as shown in the following screenshot:

A new project will be created and the structure will be like following:

File-based project

Whenever you add a file or folder in your file system (inside the ASP.NET 5 project folder), the changes will be automatically reflected in your application.

Support for full .NET and .NET core

You might have noticed a couple of references in the preceding project: DNX 4.5.1 and DNX Core 5.0. DNX 4.5.1 provides functionalities of full-blown .NET whereas DNX Core 5.0 supports only the core functionalities, which would be used if you are deploying the application across cross-platforms such as Apple OS X, Linux. The development and deployment of an ASP.NET Core application on a Linux machine will be explained in a later chapter.

The Project.json package

Usually, in an ASP.NET web application, we...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the offerings in Visual Studio. Step-by-step instructions are provided for installing the Visual Studio Community version, freely available for individual developers. We have also discussed the new project structure of the ASP.NET 5 application and the changes when compared to the previous versions.

In the next chapter, we are going to discuss the controllers and their roles and functionalities. We'll also build a controller and associated action methods and see how they work.