Getting started with your first .NET project in 2024 (Part 1)
A brief tutorial for someone looking to get started with first .NET project in 2024
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
— Plato
As you start your journey to become a .NET developer, the information available out there can be a bit overwhelming. In this blog post, I would like to boil it down to the very basics on how you can start working on learning/improving your skills as a junior .NET developer. The good news is that running your first .NET project has never been easier. So, let’s get started.
Install .NET SDK
In order to get started the first thing you will need is the .NET SDK insatalled on your development machine. You can find the installed or installation instruction on the .NET SDK website.
Once the dotnet sdk is installed, you can verify that it works by opening a command prompt or terminal application and running the following command.
dotnet --version
This should print out something like below. The version number will be different depending on what version was available at the time you install.
8.0.302
Or run the command below for a more detailed information about the sdk installed.
dotnet --info
Run a basic console application
Now that you have dotnet SDK installed, we can get started on learning some of the basic fundamentals of C# language basics and .NET projects.
In the command or terminal window that you opened earlier, you can run the command below to create a new basic .NET application.
dotnet new console -n Demo
The command creates a new project of console type with name Demo in a new directory. You should be able to navigate into the newly created folder inside the terminal window by running the command below
cd Demo
If you open Windows Explorer (or Finder on Mac OS) and look at the folder, you will notice there are the following files in the Demo folder that got created.
The Demo.csproj file and Program.cs files can be opened in a text editor to edit or read the contents.
In the terminal window, you should now be able to run the following command to run your first .NET project.
dotnet run Demo.csproj
This will print the following text in your terminal.
Hello, World!
Congratulations🎉🎉! You just ran your first .NET project.
NOTE: I ignored the obj and bin directories for the time being to keep things simple, as they are a bit more advanced topics. Just note that these are auto generated folders and will automatically update as you work on the project. Except from very rare cases, you will not need to touch these folders.
In the next tutorial, we will discuss more details about the contents of Demo.csproj and Program.cs files.
The next tutorial is now avaialable at the link below: