What you should know before watching

- [Instructor] You are about to watch a course in the Visual Studio Essentials series. To get the best experience, I created another course to help you prepare for this one. I recommend you watch the Visual Studio Essentials Setup and Configuration course, available in our catalog. It won't take long, and it's got important information to get you and your computer ready to continue. Let's review the information that is available in the setup course. To follow along with the examples in the series, you need to install Visual Studio and get a copy of the exercise files.

Because Visual Studio Essentials is a long-running series, it spans Microsoft releases. As a result, courses have been recorded with Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017. In most cases, that doesn't impact the content of the individual course. That's because the fundamentals of Visual Studio are the same across the editions. That setup course has other topics that are worth reviewing before taking this course. For example, it looks at the prerequisites for the series.

There is a section that explains how to download and install Visual Studio, and how to configure the Visual Studio IDE upon first launch. Plus there is a look in how to install the Zipped exercise files. Some of the courses in this series use GitHub for exercise files. Check out the setup course to learn how to work with the GitHub repositories. Once you've studied the content of the setup course, you'll have your developer computer set up and configured. If you're ready, it's time to start the journey.