NOTE: This course was originally written using Visual Studio Express 2013 for Desktop. So, the screenshots and videos may look slightly different from the current version – Visual Studio Community 2017. However, these lessons still work in the latest version.

Lesson objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will know…

• Install Visual Studio on your computer, to begin writing the game.

Installing Visual Studio Community 2017

To build a program, you need an editor – a specialized word processor for writing programs.

Most C# (and VB.Net) programmers use Visual Studio, from Microsoft.

The latest version (as of March 2018) is Visual Studio Community 2017. It’s free to download and use. You can get it here:

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

Click on the “Free download” button for “Visual Studio Community 2017”.

You should see a pop-up asking to save the installer (1.1 megabytes). Click “Save File” and wait for it to finish downloading.

When the download is done, run it. It’s named “vs_community__<numbers>.exe”.

You should see the installer screen, saying it needs to set up a few things before installing.

Click the “Continue” button and wait for the program to fetch the files it needs and install them.

For this course, you need to install the “.NET desktop development” and “Data storage and processing” workloads.

You can install more workloads (for example “Game development with Unity”), if you want. However, you do not need them for this course.

It may take some time to download and install.

After you finish the installation, reboot your computer.

Next Lesson: Lesson 02.2 – Building the solution for the game

Previous lesson: Lesson 01.1 – Defining classes and objects for the game

All lessons: Learn C# by Building a Simple RPG Index