Prerequisites

.NET Core, the open source platform, paved the way for multi-platform support in Visual Studio 2017. The editors came in different flavors, supporting both platform-specific and cross-platform IDEs:

• Visual Studio: An exclusive edition for Windows with Community, Professional and Enterprise editions:

Visual Studio 2017 IDE can be downloaded directly from https://www.visualstudio.com.

• Visual Studio for Mac: An exclusive edition for macOS, which was actually inherited from Xamarin Studio (Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft):

Visual Studio for Mac can be downloaded from https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/.

• Visual Studio Code: The cross-platform editor from Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS:

Download the desired version/edition of Visual Studio Code from https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/.

The Visual Studio 2017 installer is segregated into workloads, inpidual components, and language packs. We will be installing and using Visual Studio Community 2017 with the workloads ASP.NET and web development and .NET Core cross-platform development. The workload is a combination of one or more inpidual components which can also be installed from the Inpidual components tab of the installer, as follows:

New Visual Studio installer with workloads 

We have looked at the different flavors/editions of Visual Studio available to us, and we will be using Visual Studio Community on our journey, which is free of charge for private and test purposes. It is up to the reader to pick an edition which suits their needs (the tools and scaffolding available in the IDE might differ).