Visual Studio 2017 as a development environment

As a developer, you need an environment for your daily development tasks, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 is just that. It provides a very efficient and productive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating new software projects and developing, debugging, and testing them. It will help you to build high-quality applications in a very quick and intuitive way. Many of its features have been built around common development tasks and how to streamline and optimize them within a single tool.

You can create web applications, web services, desktop applications, mobile applications, and many other types of applications not covered within this book.

Additionally, you can use a wide range of programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F#, JavaScript, and even Java.

There are different editions of Visual Studio 2017, each with their own unique features and licenses. The Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, for instance, is free of charge but cannot be used for applications running in production environments. The main goal of this version is private usage and learning purposes.

The Visual Studio 2017 Professional and Enterprise Editions contain everything, including the necessary licenses, to build and run applications in production environments.

The Visual Studio 2017 Professional Edition contains a subset of all features that are offered in the Enterprise Edition. It is usually sufficient to start with this edition and then upgrade to the Enterprise Edition if necessary.

The Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition contains a lot of additional features to improve developer productivity even more, such as live dependency validation, testing, architecture diagrams, architecture validation, code cloning, and many others. If you need these features, then you need to use this edition.

Note that multiple versions of Visual Studio (2013, 2015, 2017, 2017 Preview, and more) can be installed side by side on a developer machine, which has earlier versions of the Visual Studio IDE installed.

Traditionally, Visual Studio was released only for Windows, but a macOS version has existed since 2016 called Visual Studio for macOS. You can use it for developing your .NET applications on this operating system.

The Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition is exactly what we need for trying out and understanding the examples illustrated in this book, so that is why we are going to use this edition throughout the rest of the chapters.