This page is an installation guide for all the tools we’ll need to begin writing programs in C#. This guide is oriented towards users of Windows. If you use Mac, you can talk to me for guidance on how to set up.

Here’s a list of the tools we’re going to install and what we’ll use them for:

  • The .NET SDK: This is a set of software development tools that includes the C# programming language as a part of it.
  • Visual Studio Code: This is a “text editor”, a program used to edit raw text files (as opposed to structured or rich text files, such as word docs). VS Code is a popular program for writing code in many modern programming languages, including C#. It’s a pretty piece of software that’s color customizable, so we’ll go over how you can make it more to your liking once we install it.

.NET SDK

I won’t go into too much detail describing what the .NET SDK is or what any of that stands for. We need to install this set of software tools to write and run C# programs, so we’re going to need to install it. You can download it here. Run the installer that gets downloaded when you hit the big purple button, and you’ll be all set.

Visual Studio Code

You’ll want to go to the Visual Studio Code site and hit the button that says “Download for Windows”.

Extensions and Customizing

One of the first things VS Code will prompt you to do when you open it will be changing the color theme to one that you like. There are a few that come built in, but I’m not a huge fan of any of those. If you click on the symbol on the left-hand side toolbar in VS Code that looks like 4 blocks, you can search for extensions and themes. Before searching for a theme, search “C#” and install the C# extension. It should have somewhere over 15 million downloads, and will probably be the first search result. This will make writing C# in VS Code convenient for us. Now, to browse through available color themes, click on File > Preferences > Color Theme at the top left of your VS Code window. Click on the option that says “Browse additional color themes”. Now, as you scroll through the available themes, you should preview each one. There are very many of these, so searching through all of them might be tedious. There’s no harm in changing your theme later. Customizing your programming environment so that you like looking at it is important and helps motivation a lot, so don’t feel bad about taking time on this.

As for suggestions, my favorite themes are: