Visual Studio Community

Visual Studio is the professional IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice for many .NET developers. It's created by Microsoft, who also makes the .NET framework as well as the C# programming language, so this makes perfect sense. Historically, VS (short for Visual Studio) has been expensive to use, but fortunately for you and me, Microsoft has offered a free version for individual developers for many years.

Previously, this free version came in separate versions for various tasks, e.g. Visual C# Express, Visual Web Developer and so on. However, now the name is simply Visual Studio Community and just like the Express versions, it's a lighter version of the professional version of Visual Studio. This means that you will be missing out on some functionality, but don't worry about it - the Community edition contains all but the most advanced features and it will be more than enough to learn C# through this tutorial.

Download Visual Studio Community

So, to get started with this tutorial, go ahead and download Visual Studio Community from visualstudio.com. Here's a direct link to the download page:

https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

As soon as you have downloaded and installed it, you are ready to proceed with the next articles, where we will create your very first C# application.

Not using Windows?

Don't worry, there's a version for macOS as well - just follow the link above and be sure to select the version of Visual Studio Community for macOS!