Introducing Tools and Skills for .NET
In this first chapter, the goals are understanding the tools and skills that you will learn in this book, setting up your development environment to use Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code, or JetBrains Rider, and then setting up a database and projects to use in the rest of the chapters. Throughout this book, I will use the names Visual Studio, Code, and Rider to refer to these three code editors respectively.
I use the term modern .NET to refer to .NET 8 and its predecessors like .NET 6, which derive from .NET Core. I use the term legacy .NET to refer to .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard. Modern .NET is a unification of those legacy platforms and standards.
Every chapter in this book introduces some tools and some skills, but some chapters are more focused on a particular tool or a particular skill.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- Introducing this book and its contents
- Setting up your development environment
- Making good use of the GitHub repository for this book
- Where to go for help
- Setting up a database and projects for this book
- Using .NET 9 with this book
The GitHub repository for this book has solutions using full application projects for all code tasks:
https://github.com/markjprice/tools-skills-net8/
After going to the GitHub repository, simply press the . (dot) key on your keyboard or change .com to .dev to change the repository into a live code editor based on Code using GitHub Codespaces. Code in a web browser is great to run alongside your chosen code editor as you work through the book’s coding tasks. You can compare your code to the solution code and easily copy and paste parts if needed.
