As a developer, you need an environment for your daily development tasks, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 is just that. It provides a very efficient and productive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating new software projects and developing, debugging, and testing them. It will help you to build high-quality applications in a very quick and intuitive way. Many of its features have been built around common development tasks and how to streamline and optimize them within a single tool.

You can create web applications, web services, desktop applications, mobile applications, and many other types of applications not covered within this book.

Additionally, you can use a wide range of programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F#, JavaScript, and even Java.

There are different editions of Visual Studio 2017, each with...

Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition is installed like any other Windows application.

For the Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition installation, you can choose between the following three different Visual Studio 2017 installation modes:

• The Express Installation installs all of the components that are considered default components by Microsoft in an easy and quick way. If you need specific Visual Studio features not found in this list, then you need to use the Custom Installation.
• The Custom Installation gives you full choice over every Visual Studio 2017 feature you can install. You may, for instance, install complementary features such as Visual C++, F#, SQL Server Data Tools,...

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight and powerful cross-platform development environment for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

You can use a wide range of programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js as well as C++, C#, Python, PHP, Go, and the .NET Core and Unity runtimes via language and runtime extensions.

It comes with a streamlined, clean, and very efficient user interface. There is a file and folder explorer on the left and a source code editor on the right, showing the contents of files you have opened and are currently working on:

The user interface consists of the following areas:

• Activity bar: Provides several different views and additional context-specific indicators such as outgoing code changes when Git is enabled.
• Sidebar: Contains a file and folder explorer for working on your projects.
• Editor groups...

We are now going to explain how easy and fast it is to install Visual Studio Code on Linux. One of the most popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu 16.04, will serve as an example.

If you do not have a physical or virtual installation of Linux Ubuntu available, you can easily install it in Azure for trying out Visual Studio Code and understanding the various ASP.NET Core 2.0 examples, and then connect via Microsoft Remote Desktop app to it.

In this case, select the Linux Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image from the Azure Marketplace and create a new Linux Ubuntu VM in Azure. Leave all of the default options, then configure it to allow remote desktop connections (install compatible desktop, install xrdp, open port 3389, and more):

Let's see how to install Visual Studio Code on Linux Ubuntu:

1. First, download the Linux Ubuntu install .deb package...

In this chapter, you have learned how to set up your development environment to be able to work with ASP.NET Core 2.0. You have seen how to install either Visual Studio 2017 or Visual Studio Code.

You then created your first ASP.NET Core 2.0 web application in both development environments, and you have even built a project in Linux to showcase the cross-platform capabilities.

In the next chapter, we will talk about how to set up a continuous integration pipeline by using Visual Studio Team Services, including work items and Git branches, as well as build and release pipelines.