You can go to https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/ to select and download the Visual Studio 2019 edition that best suits your needs. There are three different editions available, that is, Visual Studio Community Edition 2019, Visual Studio Professional Edition 2019, and Visual Studio Enterprise Edition 2019.
The Visual Studio Community Edition is a free, fully-featured IDE for students, open source developers, and individual developers. In all these cases, you can create your own free or paid apps using Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. Organizations will also be able to use the Community Edition, but only under the following conditions:
- In an enterprise organization, an unlimited number of users can use the Community Edition if they are using it in a classroom learning environment, academic research, or an open source project. An organization is defined as an enterprise organization if they have more than 250 computers or one-million-dollar annual revenue.
- In a non-enterprise organization, the Community Edition is restricted to five users.
To find out more about the Visual Studio Community license terms, check out this page: https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/.
If you are a professional working within a small team, you need to select Visual Studio Professional Edition 2019. If you need to create an end-to-end solution for a team of any size, you need to select Visual Studio Enterprise Edition 2019.
Once you have downloaded the online/web installer, double-click it to start the installation process. This will show a screen where you can read the license terms and privacy statement, which you need to agree to before continuing with the installation process.
Once you click the Continue button, the installer will take a few minutes to prepare itself, as shown in the following screenshot:
The main screen of the installer has four different tabs: Workloads, Individual Components, Language Packs, and Installation locations.
The Workloads tab allows you to select the group of components that come under a single module. In other words, each workload contains the features you need for the programming language or platform you prefer.
For example, if you like to build WPF applications, you need to select .NET desktop development; to build ASP.NET web applications, you need to select ASP.NET and web development module under the Workloads tab.
To install and build applications for both WPF and Windows 10, select .NET desktop development and Universal Windows Platform development, as shown in the following screenshot. For each individual workload, the selected components will be listed on the right-hand panel of the screen:
The Individual components tab lists all of the components that are a part of individual workloads, in categories. The components part of the selected workloads will be auto-checked by default. This is shown in the following screenshot:
The third tab is called Language packs and allows you to choose the language that you want to use with Visual Studio 2019. By default, it's the system default language, which is English in my case; however, you can opt for Chinese, French, German, or any other language from the available list:
By default, a file location is prepopulated for the installer to install Visual Studio 2019, but you can change it to a different folder if you wish. The fourth tab, called Installation locations, allows you to select the IDE installation path, installation cache path, and shared components path, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once you are done customizing the installation components, click on the Install button. This will start the actual installation process. If you are using the web installer, it will download the individual modules from the Microsoft server and install them gradually. This may take some time, based on your selected workloads/components and internet bandwidth:
Once the installation has been completed, it may ask you to restart your system for the changes to take effect. If you see such a message on your screen, make sure to restart your computer by clicking the Restart button.