1.2 What You Need

It should come as no surprise that our tool of choice for writing asp.net applications is currently Visual Studio. I say currently because I'm hopeful that in the near future, we will have other options. And that hope is based upon the direction that Microsoft is taking with asp.net. I'm not going to go into any detail on that but if you are interested in looking at what is coming to the platform, I will have some links in this lesson's description. So for this course you will need Visual Studio. And you have two options, you can either pay for it or use one of the trials of the paid for software or you can use the free Express edition. And for this course I'm going to be using Visual Studio Express for Web. This has everything that you need to write ASP.NET applications. Of course, it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that are found in Professional or above but it gets the job done. As I'm recording this, the current version is 2013 with Update 3. Microsoft does a very good job of keeping Visual Studio updated, and it's not just updates to Visual Studio. But you will also find updates to ASP.NET, so you will always want to have the latest updates installed. Now in this case, update three is installed automatically whenever you install Visual Studios so you don't have to worry about that. But if you do already have Visual Studio already installed but don't have the latest update you can get that from this downloads page, somewhere around here we should find updates for Visual Studio. Here they are, there's update 3 for 2013, and there's update 4 for 2012. Now for this course, I've mentioned that I'm using Visual Studio Express For Web. There are two ways that you can install this, you can use the web installer, which I recommend using because I haven't had any problems whatsoever with the web installer or you can download the ISO. Now I have had some issues with the ISO, either it gets corrected during the download or something I really don't know. But for some reason I rarely have success with the ISO. And if you use the web installer you can just get it started, go off get a cup of coffee, come back and it's done. Now even though the Express edition is free, you do have to register it. After 30 days it will stop working if you don't register, but that's a small price to pay for having free, wonderful development tools. So once you have have Visual Studio installed and you run it for the first time, the first thing you should do is install the Web Essentials add-in. If you go under TOOLS and then Extensions and Updates, over on the left-hand side you will want to click on Online. And usually the first or second spot is the Web Essentials add-in. It's already installed for me because I have this green check mark here, but I actually only have the one for Update 2. I need to update for Update 3. So after you do have it installed if there are any updates to any add-ins that you have may you can go to updates. And then you just have to find whatever add-in that you need to update and then click on update. Then it will download the update and install it. In this case, it's going to download the installer. It will install, and then I will have to restart Visual Studio. Let's create the project that we are going to use throughout this course. You can create a project by clicking on new project here on the start page. Or you can go to file and then new project. Either way it will take you to this new project window. We want to go to Visual C Sharp and we want to go to Web here. The reason why we want to go to Web is because if you look at the list, just at Visual C #, we have ASP.NET Web Application and then we have ASP.NET Web Application. The reason why we see two application projects is because one is for 2013, the other is for 2012. If you click on the web, then all we have is just the one web application for 2013. If you expand web there's Visual Studio 2012, and then there's a lot more options there. So, we want this ASP.NET Web Application, let's just call this M-V-C-C-M-S. And after you press enter, we will have this new ASP.NET project window. This is going to allow us to choose a template to create our application and then if we want to we can add in some extra components like if we choose a web forms we can add in MVC if we wanted to do that. In our case we're going to use the empty template and we're going to check MVC. Now we could use the MVC template but that's going to give us a lot of extra stuff. And it's not that we're not going to use some of that extra stuff. It's just that I like to create with a completely blank slate. And by choosing the empty template and then checking MVC, that's exactly what we get. And let's go ahead and let's click add unit tests. Now I'm not sure if we're going to do any testing in this course, but if we do, we will at least have the test project there for us to use. So now that we have our project ready to go, we will start writing code in the next lesson.