What you should know and have

- Let's cover the prerequisites for this course. First and foremost, this course assumes that you know C Sharp and ASP.NET MVC. A little bit of Entity Framework nudge will be helpful, but not required. This course doesn't really cover Entity Framework, there are a couple things I need to talk about from a version perspective, but the data access layer is written in Entity Framework in the example code, so it might be helpful for you to know a little but about Entity Framework.

From a software perspective, the main piece of software we need of course is Visual Studio 2017. This can be any edition, the community edition is free, and is essentially the same as professional from a future perspective, but you're going to want to make sure it is 15.3 or later. Now that's a specific version within 2017. And we need 15.3 to run .NET Core 2.0. You also need to have .NET Core installed on your machine.

If you're going to run all the samples in this course then you'll need the latest 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 versions and you'll want to install the 32 bit and 64 bit SDKs and you can download those from the URL on your screen. And then there's a couple optional pieces, SQL Server Management Studio, I'm using 2017 Management Studio itself is free, so there's no cost with that, it is completely optional but I find it to be easier to go looking at the database than using what's built in to Visual Studio.

And then if you want to run in Docker, and we covered Docker in the ASP.net Core 2.0 section of this course, you're going to actually need SQL Server Express or higher edition 2016 or later, and Docker for Windows. Now those are both free installs as well, and if you don't want to run in Docker, we'll talk about how we can disable Docker in that module, and then you won't need to install those pieces of software.