Installing Visual Studio

At the heart of ML.NET development is Microsoft Visual Studio. For all samples and screenshots used throughout this book, Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Professional on Windows 10 19H2 will be used. At the time of writing, 16.3.0 is the latest version. Please use the latest version available. If you do not have Visual Studio 2019, a fully featured Community version is available for free on www.visualstudio.com.

For the scope of this book as mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Machine Learning and ML.NET, we will be creating a wide range of application types to demonstrate ML.NET in various problem areas on specific application platforms. Hence, we are going to install several of the available workloads upfront to avoid having to return to the installer in later chapters:

1. Firstly, ensure that .NET desktop development, Universal Windows Platform Development, and ASP.NET and web development are checked. These workloads will enable you to create UWP, WPF, and ASP.NET applications that we will be using in later chapters:

2.  In addition, ensure that .NET Core cross-platform development is also checked. This will enable .NET Core development for both command-line and desktop apps, such as the app we will be making later in this chapter: