As a developer, you need an environment for your daily development tasks, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 is just that.

There are many other IDEs available for developers across different programming languages, with some notable ones being NetBeans, PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, Code::Blocks, and XCode, among others. While you can use many of these to program using C#, which is the base language that we'll make use of in this book, it must be noted that the aforementioned IDEs are more suited for other languages, such as Python and Java.

Other IDEs that are more suitable for the C# programming languages include Visual Studio Code, MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop (#develop), JetBrains Rider, CodeMaid, and .NET Fiddle.

This book will make use of the two most commonly used IDEs for developers on the Microsoft tech stack: the Visual Studio series and Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio 2019 provides a very efficient and productive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating new software projects and developing, debugging, and testing them. It will help you build high-quality applications in a very quick and intuitive way. Many of its features have been built around common developmental tasks and how to streamline and optimize them within a single tool. By using this tool, you can create web applications, web services, desktop applications, mobile applications, and many other types of application that are not covered in this book.

Additionally, you can use a wide range of programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F#, JavaScript, and even Java or other languages that are not maintained by Microsoft.

There are different editions of Visual Studio 2019, each with its own unique features and licenses. The Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition, for instance, is free of charge but has fewer features than the Professional and Enterprise Editions, which we will explain later. The intended usage of the community version is for private use and learning purposes. 

The Visual Studio 2019 Professional and Enterprise Editions contain far more features, including the necessary licenses to build and run applications in production environments.

The Visual Studio 2019 Professional Edition contains a subset of all the features that are offered in the Enterprise Edition. It is usually sufficient to start with this edition and then upgrade to the Enterprise Edition if necessary.

Visual Studio 2019 Enterprise Edition contains a lot of additional features that we can use to improve developer productivity even more, such as time travel debugging, live dependency validation, live testing, architecture diagrams, architecture validation, code cloning, and many others. If you need these features, then you need to use this edition.

A full comparison of what features are available for each edition can be found at the following link: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/.

Traditionally, Visual Studio was released only for Windows, but a macOS version has existed since 2016 called Visual Studio for macOS. You can use it to develop your .NET applications on this operating system. Visual Studio for macOS supports developing .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Mono library (including .NET Standard), and Xamarin apps. You can build the same kind of ASP.NET Core apps that you can in Visual Studio but the tooling is not as rich yet.

The Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition is exactly what we need for trying out and understanding the examples that will be illustrated in this book. This is exactly why we'll be installing it in the next section.