>> Tune into this week's ON.NET,
where I have my good friend Katie Savage on
talking about the.NET coding pack.
The easiest way to get started learning C# and
building apps with.NET whether you're a student,
a teacher or just getting started,
you're definitely going to want to check this out so tune in.
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Everyone, I'm James Montemagno and I'm
back with another ON.NET video.
This time talking about the easiest way to get started
learning C# and building applications with.NET.
I have one of my best friends in
the entire world Katie Savage on. How's it going, Katie?
>> Hi, I'm flattered.
>> Katie and I work together every single day,
and you have a really cool journey
to your life and job here at Microsoft.
Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
>> Yeah, sure. I'm actually a recent graduate.
I've been out of school about six-eight months now.
But before that, I interned at Microsoft with the MakeCode team.
I got my entry into the education space and the tech space early.
Once I graduated, I came on to James' team,
the.NET community team, with a real focus on education.
I really want to support students, new developers,
and educators in our space, the.NET environment.
>> Yeah. If you're seeing any cool tweaks to
the website or documentation,
that's all Katie, she did it all.
>> Well, I did parts
little parts supported by all you great people.
>> Team effort. Now, this topic is actually really
interesting because I think I've been
a.NET developer for like ever.
It's almost automatic for me to know what to install,
where to go, how to get started.
Jayme Singleton has a great video.
Like all the learning resources,
I'll put that up over here on
YouTube or down in the show notes everywhere else.
But you actually work on a really cool project called
the.NET coding pack. What is that?
>> Yeah. Something I hear a lot from students and can attest to
myself is that setting
up your coding environment is really tricky.
You never know what you're supposed to get and how to get it.
The.NET coding pack is a great experience because
it's one download that gives you Visual Studio code,
the.NET SDK within that environment
as well as a bunch of extensions to really get you
started with.NET without all the craziness
of searching around for what you need.
The cool thing is
all these different extensions will update automatically as well.
>> Of course. It's like a really like
one click-install-go is what you're saying?
>> Exactly. One click,
you go through the install process and boom, it's all there.
>> Who is this good for?
I mentioned a few different categories,
but like who is the target audience for this coding pack?
>> This coding pack can really be used by anyone new to.NET,
but in particular students,
those who are new to the tech space generally,
and also just tech switchers and
also educators as well because we have a lot of
great notebook experiences that can be
customized and used to create lessons and other learning content.
>> Cool. I'm really excited to check it out,
see how easy it is.
I don't think it's ever really been like a one click install.
Besides maybe getting Visual Studio
and checking a bunch of check boxes,
so I'm excited to see how this all works.
Do you want to show it off?
>> Yeah. Let me show you how it works.
>> Cool.
>> Right now I'm in a window sandbox,
and that really gives me a good experience.
It's a nice, clean instance of Windows 11 so that I can
show how this experience is going to look for
someone who doesn't have any of these tools yet.
>> Got it.
>> First off, I'm on the.NET website and this is
where you're going to get the coding pack and
a lot of our other great learning resources.
What I'm going to do here is go to
this Learn tab and go to Learn to Code in C#.
Actually I already have that open in this tab here.
On this page we just have a bunch of
our great C# learning content and tools.
First off, here's our coding pack.
As you can see, it's
Visual Studio code with all of
those extensions that I mentioned before.
I'll show that off in just a second.
But I want to quickly show
the other great C# and.NET learning resources we have.
Going down a little bit, we have
these awesome interactive notebooks for C#.
This is a great repository that once we have
our VS code we can then go
into these notebooks and bring them over to VS code.
We also have Microsoft Learn,
which has a bunch of great lesson plans.
They're very interactive and they allow you to build
basically any app that you can want to build.
You can build a web app, a mobile app, etc.,
and all that content is right here.
We also have great videos and other resources.
But let me go back to
the coding pack because that's what we're focused on today.
Right here, as you can see,
we have a download for Windows and Mac as well.
You can also get this on Linux,
it's just a little bit of a different process.
You're going to need to get VS code
then the interactive notebooks extension for that.
But since I'm in Windows,
let me go ahead and download that.
>> Really, you just come to this website and this will be
just the latest and greatest version of it basically?
>> Exactly, this gets updated
any time the pack itself is updated.
>> Okay, cool. I see it's actually really not that big.
It's like 40 megabytes, it looks like?
>> Yeah, not that big at all.
It's a pretty quick process
depending on the speed of your machine.
I'm going to go ahead and let that go to work.
That's loading up. But the great thing about this pack is,
as I'll show in a bit,
once you get everything loaded up,
you'll be launched into a Getting
Started experience right off the bat.
Not only do you have the whole setup that you
need with all the extensions there,
but you're going to instantly be
put into this learning experience.
There that goes.
Let me minimize this.
The install is ready. All I have to do is click
"Next" which I'll do right now.
Agree to the license agreement and it's going to start installing.
>> This is going to install, like you said, all the bit,
I can see it's downloading VS code but you
said it's also installing.NET
in a self-contained instance
and then also the extension, correct?
>> Exactly. It's starting with the Visual Studio code.
Once that's done, you'll see that pop up on my desktop actually.
Then it'll begin getting the.NET
SDK within that and then all the extensions come after.
>> Perfect.
>> Awesome. It looks like it's all done.
Let me launch us into VS code when I click "Finish".
>> Now, like you said, of course, like
everyone's machine and internet
is going to be a little bit different.
Of course, sharing your screen over
here so it's going to be a little bit slower.
But I know if I ran through this
with you and I think it only took me
like a minute or two normally,
which is cool but it's really quick.
>> Yeah, it's usually a pretty quick experience.
Of course, if you're sharing your screen or using something else,
it might be a bit slower,
but usually pretty quick.
It's launching us right into our Getting
Started with.NET notebook here.
>> It's different, like I am used
to installing VS code and then here's VS code and that's it.
You're saying some other stuff is happening now?
>> Exactly. As you can see on the bottom right,
it's installing stuff and we're
getting launched right into our Getting Started notebook here.
I can also give you a brief look
at some of these extensions as well,
and then I'll get into the notebook.
>> As you can see, it already
installed all of these extensions that we need here.
The.NET extension pack, Interactive Notebooks.
There's support for C#, F#,
Jupyter, everything you really need to get started with.NET here.
Let me open this up as well.
>> That's really nice. Automatically,
you just had one install and it looked like it was installing.
Just like here's the.NET SDK in VS Code,
but actually it installed all of those different extensions,
and I'm launched into an experience
where I'm learning, is what you're saying?
>> Exactly. This pack is really
an experience for students and beginners,
so that they don't have to worry about any of that
install woes or craziness.
They can just do that one download,
go through the install process and they've got it all here.
As you can see, our notebook started up.
This is a.NET interactive notebook and here we've got
some really good just C# syntax and other content to get
people off running with C#.
We have syntax, basics, introducing variables.
We have some stuff working with
strings and this is just like any other notebook.
I could go ahead and run one of these cells.
I'll do our hello world to get us started on the right foot.
>> That's cool because this is actually live
code blocks that are editable, basically.
>> Exactly. That's running.
>> Of course, here, through the magic of screen sharing,
it's going to be super slow for us, of course.
>> Of course, as it always is.
Hello world, I can go in and I can change that.
I could say, hello, James.
>> Hello.
>> There we go.
This is really a great way to
get jumped into this experience of working with C#,
but it doesn't end here.
As I mentioned before, we have a lot of other C# notebooks
and learning content that can be brought into this experience.
I'm going to go ahead and show that.
Let me go back to my browser
and I'm going to go to the notebooks once we get down here.
>> There's a whole GitHub repository full of these notebooks.
You get one with it,
but you're saying there's a whole bunch of them?
>> There's a whole bunch of them.
The cool thing here is that each one of
these different notebooks, number 1,
covers a different topic,
but they also have
accompanying videos as well as we've linked in some documentation.
So that as a learner,
you can really go in and get
more information to expand upon these learnings.
Let's say I wanted to learn about branches.
I could go ahead, click that,
and it's going to try to open this in VS Code,
which is exactly what we want.
It's going to open that up,
and it's going to open that notebook
right here once it's done loading up.
>> That's cool. You didn't even have to download anything.
You just clicked a link and
it automatically downloaded it to VS Code for you.
>> Exactly. It's a super streamlined experience.
As you can see, here's that great content.
It links to the video.
Here we have all of this.
Once again, I can run it.
As a new learner, I could really come
in here and just play around.
I have some good guidance with all of the content,
but I can just go into one of these cells and mess around
with some of these little code segments here.
>> That's really cool. I like also that
there's videos accompanying them.
If you are more of a interactive visual learner
with video content, then you're good to go.
>> Exactly. We really thought
about how different students have different learning styles,
and we want to be able to
support people of all different learning styles.
As you can see, this ran and we have,
as you saw, about 10 notebooks in there.
There's so much content for learning
C# and all of the topics associated with that.
>> Cool.
>> But further, you can go beyond that and
really learn how to make a web app or anything else.
That's where we go to MS Learn, as I mentioned before.
I'm going to go back to our.NET website,
go learn C#,
and I'm going to get started with
Microsoft Learn and this is going to take you to
a whole area with a ton of
different learning modules, all associated with.NET.
You can really learn how to build anything that you want here.
>> Awesome.
>> This is what that looks like.
>> This is free self-guided learning.
>> Go ahead. Free self-guided learning packs.
>> Cool.
>> These are all free. These particular learning packs
will have several modules involved.
Let's say I want to learn how to build a web app with Blazor.
I can click on this learning path.
It's for beginners.
Within this learning path,
there's a ton of modules.
There's an introduction,
getting started with building,
interacting with data, all this awesome content.
But since I have my VS Code open,
I really want to get to building.
I'm just going to skip into our building
a web app with Blazor exercise.
>> This is cool. You show that there were notebooks,
but then actually you can just
take these learn modules and actually build stuff?
>> Exactly. Because we are still within VS Code.
So you can really build anything that you need to build there.
First off, it wants us to check that we have the correct.NET SDK.
Let's go ahead and do that.
Just make sure we're all set up with this experience.
I'm going to open up a terminal,
and once that gets loaded up,
I'm going to copy paste.
There we go.
As you can see, we have our.NET 6 SDK.
As I mentioned before,
this SDK is really an encapsulated experience.
It's in this roaming folder here,
which means that it's within this Visual Studio Code environment,
but it's not a system wide install.
>> That's cool. That way,
if you're on a non-admin machine, it's controlled.
>> Exactly. Let me go back to our Blazor tutorial.
It wants me to open a folder called BlazorApp.
I'm going to go ahead and do that in here.
I'm going to File, open a folder.
I'm going to do it in
my desktop and name
it BlazorApp because that's what the module told me to do.
Select that. I'm not going to say, "Don't Save."
Now it's going to boot up this folder here.
Great. In my folder, what's next?
It wants me to create a Blazor server app.
I'm going to go ahead and do that.
Once again, I'm opening the terminal.
I'm within my BlazorApp folder.
So now I'm going to create that app once it allows me to.
>> You really have a full environment,
set up everything that you need.
Well, it is in that area that you said,
you are still accessing things outside of your desktop?
>> Exactly. Although it is, as I've said,
encapsulated experience, you really have access to
do and build all the things that you could want to build with.NET.
Here's my Blazor server app.
As you can see, I've got my program.cs,
I've got my pages and they're all here within VS Code.
If I wanted to run this app,
just to show you what that looks like,
you can just do a.NET run,
and let's see what happens.
It's going to build it.
>> This is nice because if you've
never used obviously VS Code and.NET,
the module is walking you through this experience,
but the education pack brings it all together into one place.
>> Exactly. The MS Learn content is really expansive,
and it's great that now we have a place where all of
that can be done just after one quick install.
All of this, you can go from not having VS Code at all to now
having all of the tools you need to then create a Blazor app.
Let me go ahead and do this, control real quick.
I'm going to continue to
local host to show you what's going on here.
Boom, your first Blazor app and
it's all done just
with the coding pack and some great content from MS Learn.
>> Awesome. That's really cool to see it all come
together and then you can just start coding right now,
hence the coding pack.
>> Yeah. Exactly. It's a really great
easy getting started experience and
something I'm really excited for students to get to use and
not have to worry about setting up everything on their own.
>> Very cool. I love it.
I love that, not only was it
some cool stuff built-in to the coding pack,
but also being able to download more
content and actually build real things. It's so cool.
>> Exactly. We've really thought about this as an experience,
but also as a stepping off point to be able to
then build more apps of all different kinds.
>> Very cool.
Awesome. Well, Katie,
thank you so much for coming out and
showing this off. I really appreciate it.
>> Yeah. Thank you so much, James. It's been a blast.
>> I'll put show notes links down
to the bottom of everything that Katie showed off today.
It's an education back to Microsoft Learn to just normal getting
started stuff and so that video of
all the different learning resources as well.
Katie, thank you so much again
for coming on. I really appreciate it.
>> Perfect. Thank you so much.
>> Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
Don't forget to smash that
like button if you're ever on YouTube
and forget to subscribe as well,
so you get updates every single week right
here on YouTube and over on Microsoft Docs.
I really appreciate your time and I appreciate all of you for
tuning in every single week
and be sure to check all of our live streams.
Head over to live.dotnet
for more and I'll put links in the show notes below.
Until next time, I'm James Montemagno and this has been On.NET.
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