Setting up .Net 6 SDK and Code Editor

If you want to work locally on your machine, you must set up the following environment.

.Net 6 SDK

.NET 6 SDK contains both the platform on which you will run your applications and the collection of tools that will allow you to develop the applications. The best place to download the SDK is its official website.

.NET 6 SDK will give you access to all the tools that you will need to instantiate your projects and build your applications. One of the powerful tools it comes with is the .NET command-line interface (CLI) tool. It allows us to instantiate, build and run .NET applications via any command-line terminal on any supported operating system. All the commands will be the same regardless of which operating system you use.

Of course, you don’t necessarily have to use CLI to build and run your application. You can do all of this via a graphical user interface (GUI) of the integrated development environment (IDE) of your choice. However, because different operating systems have different IDEs available and they look completely different, all instructions provided in the course will be based on CLI commands.

Code editor

There is a significant difference between a code editor and an IDE. Code editor merely allows you to write the code. It provides all the necessary syntax highlighting and auto-formatting, but this is about it. You will need to either install special plug-ins or use external tools to be able to instantiate your projects or build your applications. But the biggest advantage that code editors have over IDEs is that code editors are much more lightweight and are much quicker to load.

IDE, on the other hand, is a one-stop shop for software development. All steps of developing your software can be done inside the IDE without relying on any external tools. Each of the actions, such as instantiating your project, running unit tests, building and running your application, would have a corresponding menu item in the GUI. But all these features come at a price. IDEs would occupy much more disk space than code editors, and they are much more resource-hungry.

Whether you decide to use a code editor or an IDE, it doesn’t matter. All examples provided in this course would work with either.