Getting Started With Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition

Introduction

Today, Microsoft released its developer IDE, Visual Studio 2019. In this article, we will go through the steps to download and install VS 2019 and create a simple ASP.NET Core Web application.  

You can download and install it from here – https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

Visual Studio 2019 Community edition is free. 

Once you download, the installer will start installing and will show you the below workloads. We can choose “ASP.NET and web development” for now.

This workload will install the following packages by default. You can add or remove any optional package from the list.

After choosing the desired packages, just click the “Install” button to proceed.

Please note that the current workloads need a total of 1.33 GB data to be downloaded.

It will take some time to download depending on the selected packages and your internet speed. If you check the Programs, you can see the below packages are installed on your machine.

Please note all the required files are installed in the following directory.

Please have a look at the release notes

The total file size of the above-selected workload (for ASP.NET web app development) is shown below.

Once the installation is completed, we can launch Visual Studio 2019. There should be an icon or a menu added to Windows. Search for Visual Studio 2019 and run it. 

It will load your existing Visual Studio profile. It may also ask you to log in to your Microsoft account. If you do not have a Microsoft account, you can create a new account. 

We can see a newly designed landing page of Visual Studio where we see a list of recent projects. We can also clone or check out the code from GitHub and Azure DevOps. We can open a project or solution and a folder. Also, we can create a new project.

Click “Create a new project” to create a new project.

You can see various project types there. Choose “ASP.NET Core Web Application” project type for now.

Give a valid name to your project and select a path for it.

Now, choose any one of the listed project templates. I chose MVC template. Please note, I have chosen ASP.NET Core 2.2 with this project. This is the current stable version of .NET Core. The new version 3.0 is still under preview mode only (As of April 2, 2019).

This template will create a Home Controller and two Views along with it. The project structure is shown below.

Now, build and run the application. I have made some minor changes in the view pages.

Conclusion

In this post, we have seen how to download the latest Visual Studio 2019 version and install the ASP.NET web development workload. We also created a simple “Hello World” ASP.NET Core web application.

You will learn more new features of Visual Studio 2019 in my upcoming articles.