In this section, you will learn how to develop a desktop Moodle Web Services client in C# using the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Microsoft provides a free version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community. In Chapter 9, Moodle Analytics, you learned how to develop an external Web Services API, which provided details of learners who had been awarded a certificate within a given time window. For reasons of security, in transit data is encrypted. We saw that decrypting data in PHP that has been encrypted in PHP is straightforward. However, decrypting data in another programming language, such as C#, is more complicated.
Let's start by installing the tools we need.