Introduction: Hello, C# Welcome, .NET

This section’s goals include setting up the development environment, understanding the similarities and differences between modern .NET, .NET Core, .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard, and creating a simple application using C# 11 and .NET 7 with different code editors. You will also discover reliable sources for finding help and troubleshooting common issues.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code in a web browser is great to run alongside our chosen local code editor as we work through the course coding tasks. We can compare our code to the solution code and easily copy and paste parts if needed.

Key terminology across the course

Throughout this course, we use the term modern .NET to refer to .NET 7 and its predecessors, like .NET 5 and .NET 6, from .NET Core. We use legacy .NET to refer to .NET Framework, Mono, Xamarin, and .NET Standard. Modern .NET represents a unification of these legacy platforms and standards.

Section structure

The section can be divided into three parts:

1. The grammar and vocabulary of the C# language.

2. The types available in .NET for building app features.

3. The fundamentals of cross-platform websites, services, and browser apps that we can build using C# and .NET.

Most people learn complex topics best by imitation and repetition rather than reading a detailed theory explanation. Therefore, we will not overload ourselves with detailed explanations of every step throughout this course. The goal is to write some code and see it run. We don’t need to know all the details right away. That will come with time as we build our apps and go beyond what any course can teach us.

Key areas of discussion

This section covers the following topics: