Tooling Overview

[00:00:00]
>> Spencer Schneidenbach: Let me dive in a little bit about the tooling that we'll be using for this course. So if you did my C sharp workshop, a lot of these things will look very similar. First and foremost, we're gonna install the dotnet CLI. On this computer, I already have all my tooling set up and ready to go, so I'm gonna go to dotnet CLI.

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So if you wanna just follow along, open up this web page, click this nice purple download button. And click this one to install the SDK, that'll allow you to develop dotnet applications on your local machine. So pretty simple, straightforward. And once you've done that, best way to verify that you've done it correctly, go to your command prompt, type in dotnet version.

[00:00:48]
And you see that we've got the correct version of dotnet. Next we'll be installing Visual Studio Code. There's a couple of extensions that that I think you'll wanna have, if you haven't installed it already. So let's open it up. If you go to the extensions thing here, you'll see that I already have C# Dev Kit installed right there, that's pretty good.

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We also have NuGet Gallery here. NuGet Gallery is just because I'm unapologetically, a UI guy. You can choose to install NuGet packages, via the command line. I choose to use a UI for this. So NuGet Gallery is my preferred way to do that in Visual Studio Code. There's also an extension that I'll be using, but it's not really important to this, course, if you don't wanna browse the data, which is called SQL tools.

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And I'm gonna install that, and I'm gonna install the SQLite one as well. It's optional, if you wanna be able to browse the data, that's a little bit later, but you can do that if you like. That should be it for Visual Studio Code. And then, yes, Postman.

[00:01:55]
So you can install Postman. So we'll be building these, as we build these APIs, you'll be able to execute them in browser using a tool called Swagger, which we'll get into. But if you choose to use Postman, I prefer it over using Swagger. So what you can do is just go to postman.com slash downloads, and download the version that's appropriate for your computer.

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When they install it, they want you to sign in and create an account, you don't need to do that. You can just keep hitting skip until you get to the end there. I'm gonna be using it, not logged in for what it's worth. As far as going and actually building a new project, I just wanna do a brief overview of some of the the command that you're gonna see me run, first of all, dotnet new.

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Dotnet new is gonna be the thing that allows us to actually, start and create our projects. We will be creating a new web app, and I'll demonstrate that in the next section. If you wanna see a list of all the available templates that you have, you can go to dotnet new list.

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The dotnet SDK comes with a huge amount of them, already pre installed. There's also some community ones for specialized use cases. If you wanna, for example, install the SpaTemplates, collection of dotnet new projects. You could do that via the command line. You'll see me do dotnet run, quite a bit.

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Pretty straightforward, pretty standard. I'll also do it in the UI quite a bit. And dotnet test, which is one of my favorite, we'll be running this one a lot, because we do lots of tests. We will be writing lots of tests, it's part of this project. Couple of questions that I wanna address.

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First question was, do I need windows? Do I need Visual Studio? As I mentioned earlier, you absolutely do not, I don't use them if I can help it. I do use Visual Studio, and I think it's a fine piece of software. I do use it for legacy dotnet development, stuff that was kinda 20 years old or so.

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But you don't have to have it, and you certainly don't have to have Windows. Or I got an interesting question in my other course as well. Which was, Visual Studio for Mac is retired, Microsoft decided not to support it anymore. Does that mean that they're not gonna be supporting Mac very soon?

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And I said, absolutely not. That's not what that means. It's just Visual Studio for Mac wasn't a very good product, frankly. So with that, you can just use Visual Studio code. My preferred IDE for dotnet, it's the best dotnet IDE in the world. Sorry, Microsoft is JetBrains Rider.

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It's fully featured, so it has a lot of really nice convenience things, as you're developing. And it has a huge amount of refactoring tools as well, which is what I use them for. It's also easy to find, pretty much anything you ever wanna find. JetBrains Rider is by far, my favorite IDE.

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I'll mention one last thing. If you don't have Docker installed, you could install it. There's one thing that I kinda wanna just show you at the very end of the course, that has to do with Docker, but that's optional.