You have decided to learn about ASP.NET Core 3, the most advanced and efficient cross-platform web application framework on the market today. A very good choice! You are surely eager to start programming right away, but before we can begin, we must set up the required technical prerequisites and tools.

In this chapter, we are going to introduce Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition and Visual Studio Code, and then install either one of them as a development environment. Then, we are going to build a simple sample application based on the ASP.NET Core 3 Framework.

After going through the content in this chapter, you will be able to install different kinds of ASP.NET Core 3 development environment on the Windows operating system, macOS, and Linux. You will also learn about the basic debugging skills you'll need to troubleshoot most ASP.NET Core-based applications.

To sum up, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Visual Studio 2019 as a development environment
• How to install Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition
• Creating your first ASP.NET Core 3 application in Visual Studio and via the command line
• Basic debugging with Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition
• Visual Studio Code as a development environment
• How to install Visual Studio Code on Linux
• Creating your first ASP.NET Core 3 application in Visual Studio Code
• Creating your first ASP.NET Core 3 application in Linux
• Introduction to C# Interactive and LINQPad as tools