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. 
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
This workload will install the following packages by default. You can add or remove any optional package from the list.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
After choosing the desired packages, just click the “Install” button to proceed.

Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
Please note all the required files are installed in the following directory.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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. 
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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. 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
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.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
You can see various project types there. Choose “ASP.NET Core Web Application” project type for now.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
Give a valid name to your project and select a path for it.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
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).
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition

This template will create a Home Controller and two Views along with it. The project structure is shown below.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 
Now, build and run the application. I have made some minor changes in the view pages.
 
Working with Visual Studio 2019 free Community Edition
 

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.


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