Setting up on Windows Environment

If you are using Windows, here are the options that are available to you. You don’t have to read each of these sections. Just pick the one that is relevant to you.

Visual Studio 2022

Perhaps the most popular .NET IDE for Windows is Visual Studio. In order to be able to work with .NET 6, you’ll need Visual Studio 2022. You can download it from its official page.

There are three editions of Visual Studio 2022—Community, Professional and Enterprise. The Community edition is free to download, but you will need to register.

Note: Linux has fewer options available than either Windows or Mac OS. So you won’t be able to download this for linux.

JetBrains Rider

Rider IDE by JetBrains doesn’t come for free. But there is a reason for it. It contains many useful tools, such as ReSharper, which allow you to decompile .NET assemblies back into human-readable code.

But even though the IDE itself isn’t free, there is a free trial available. It can be downloaded from its official page

Visual Studio Code

Even though this tool sounds like Visual Studio, it’s an entirely different tool. Visual Studio Code (also known as VS Code) is a lightweight but powerful code editor. It comes completely free of charge, and you won’t need to register to use it. Also, it’s open-source and evergreen, which means that it will continuously receive updates, so you won’t have to download a new version every time a new SDK becomes available. On top of all of that, it has a very powerful plugin system, so you can almost turn it into a fully-fledged IDE.

VS Code is available on any platform. You can download it from its official website

Enabling development HTTPS certificate

This step is not strictly necessary, but it will allow you to add HTTPS protocol to your applications via a self-signed development certificate. .NET SDK comes with its own self-signed certificate, and to ensure that it works, you need to trust it. To do so on either Windows or Mac OS, all you have to do is run the following command:

dotnet dev-certs https --trust 

You can run this command in the terminal below.