Introduction
In this article, let’s see how to get started with Visual Studio 2019 RC. Microsoft has just released Visual Studio 2019 Release Candidate and now its available for download. You can download VS 2019 RC here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/
By the time you're reading this article, Microsoft probably just released its production/public release of Visual Studio 2019. In any case, both versions are pretty much the same.
This article iss planned to be a two-part series. In Part 1, we will see how to download and install Visual Studio 2019 RC. The article also shows you how to get started with Visual Studio 2019 RC. In Part 2, we will see various project templates and learn what’s new in Visual Studio 2019.
Visual Studio 2019 comes as 3 editions:
- Community: Community edition is for the students, open-source contributors, and individuals.
- Professional: Professional edition if for the small teams and individual developers and is best when you have the Visual Studio Professional subscription.
- Enterprise: Enterprise edition if for any team size and best when you have the Visual Studio Enterprise subscription.
If you don’t have Visual Studio Subscription, then it's good to download VS 2019 Community Edition. In my case, I will be installing the Enterprise edition.
When you click on the download link, you can see the confirmation screen as Thank you for downloading Visual Studio.
Install VS 2019 version
Wait for a few seconds to start installing VS 2019 on your computer. Now, you will see the final installation screen with Workloads, Individual components, Language Packs, and Installation locations.
From the Workloads tab, we can select our needed installation components of VS 2019, if you want to work with Windows Applications, UWP, ASP.NET Node.JS and Mobile Application development then we can select only that for now and start installations.
I have selected the following options:
- .NET desktop development
- Node.js development
- Mobile development with .NET
- Visual Studio extension development
- .NET Core cross-platform development
Language Pack
For my development, I have selected one more additional language as Korean. By selecting this additional language, we can see our VS 2019 in English or Korean languages. If you need any additional languages to be used, you can check from the list of available languages.
At the bottom of the installer, we can see the total space required to install our selected workloads and language pack.
Click the Install button and you can see the installation window and its progress.
After installation is completed, a restart needs to reflect the new VS 2019 installation.
Wait for few minutes to complete the VS 2019 installation on your computer.
Opening Visual Studio 2019 RC
Once Installation is completed you can open the Visual Studio 2019 RC to create your .NET Applications. Click Windows Start and enter Visual Studio 2019, You can see the Visual Studio 2019 RC, Click on that.
You can see Visual Studio 2019 RC will be opened like the image below. In the left side, you will see Open Recent projects.
In the right side, we can see few new features added in VS 2019 including
- Clone or check our code
- Open a Project or Solution
- Open a local folder
- Create a new Project
- Continue without code
Clone or check our code
This option is new in Visual Studio 2019. This tab is used to get the code from the online repository like GitHub or Azure DevOps. If you have repositories on GitHub or Azure DevOps, now it’s possible to clone or check out using Visual Studio 2019.
Click on the Clone or Check our code to add your GitHub or Azure DevOps URL to connect with your online repos.
Here for testing purposes, I've added a repository project to clone. We can see from GitHub repository, the project is loading.
We can see as our project has been opened from the GitHub repository URL.
Open a Project or Solution
To open existing project or solution, we can click on this tab on the right side and open our project or solution to work on it.
Open a local folder
This is a new feature added in VS 2019. If we want to edit any code or .NET application from a folder, we can click on this tab to open a folder or browse a to select a file.
Continue without code
This is a new feature added in VS 2019 IDE. When we click on the Continue without code, we can see empty solution is created. This is where we can add our own projects and files.
Create a new Project
By Clicking on the Create a new project, we will see a new screen with a list of project templates available to work with our .NET applications.
We can select a project template to work on, create our project and start working on it.
Conclusion
In this article, I discussed how to download and install the Visual Studio 2019 RC and how to get started with VS 2019 RC project templates. In my next article, I will discuss various project templates and new features of VS 2019.