Visual Studio Code is a fantastic editor for C# developers. VSCode + .NET Core has very quickly become my go to setup for many C# tasks. However, unlike ‘full’ Visual Studio, getting started with C# development in Code is a little bit more involved.
This post will assume that you are starting without even having Code installed, and finish up with a C# console application, referencing a class library. I will also demonstrate setting up a unit test project and executing a couple of simple unit tests.
I’ve put up a reference implementation in GitHub, that extends this tutorial a little with a couple of simple functions and tests.
Before I get into the details, it is worth saying that Visual Studio Code holds your hand a lot less than ‘full’ Visual Studio. This is a good thing. Using Code and interacting with the command line forces you to really understand what is going on under the hood, and brings you much closer to the actual development. I suspect that once you get over the initial ‘hump’, you’ll quickly come to prefer developing C# with Code over the full version of Studio.
From now on I will refer to ‘Visual Studio Code’ as ‘Code’, and the full version of Studio as ‘Visual Studio’
