Introduction
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 is the most exciting version of Visual Studio. You can download the RC from https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-2017-rc/
Visual Studio 2017 has a lot of cool features, tool support and the best developer experience right from the installation to coding to debugging to testing to deploying.
System Requirements
To know minimum requirements for successful installation of Visual Studio 2017 product family, please visit this URL.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/productinfo/vs2017-system-requirements-vs Installation
Run the downloaded .exe and you will see a very unique launch screen, as shown below.
Option Selection
Visual Studio 2017 offers a brand new way of choosing the tool sets. You can choose one of the following.
- Workload; i.e., what exactly you do or want to do.
- Individual components; i.e., hand pick all the components individually. I feel it can be messy, unless you want to cherry pick.
- Language Packs; i.e., select language of your choice.
Workloads
Workloads is the easiest and most effective way of installing all the components and the dependencies of your chosen field of development. For example, Web, desktop, cloud, node, data science etc.
This is so much loaded that you can select up to 8 “Web & Cloud” workloads, as shown below.
Individual Components
This is a tricky one and can cause issues if someone really starts to pick and choose the options from here. However, this will be a perfect choice when you just want to install “.NET Core Runtime” or some other components.
Language Packs
This enables you to pick the language of your choice. Based on your operating system, it will automatically default to a language, as shown below.
Making Selection
Once the selection is made; preferably from Workloads tab; you will see that Summary section is populated with all the components, which will be installed. If you want, you can expand each listed item under the summary and see all the components installed under each item to a very granular level.
Now, let’s begin the installation
I personally feel that this is one of the fastest Visual Studio setups since the first version I had my hands on back in 1996.
Setup Complete
Visual Studio 2017 RC setup requires you to restart your PC. You may not want to do it, but I recommend you “Restart” it.
Welcome Visual Studio 2017
Notice the recently added section and see all Visual Studio 2017 components.
Check the Installed .NET Frameworks
The image given below shows that all the .NET frameworks are successfully installed, which includes .NET Framework until 4.6.x and .NET 1.0 Preview 3. You can run the commands, as shown below, to check those in any machine.
“dotnet --version” is a very handy command to be executed from the Developer Command Prompt to identify if you have .NET Core or not.
Visual Studio Installer
In the installed items, there is an item listed at the very end “Visual Studio Installer” this is to Modify, Repair, Uninstall etc.
Let’s Fire up Visual Studio 2017
Here comes the most awaited IDE