The primary aim of this introductory course is to get your software development environment set up. I'll be working in Windows and Linux to demonstrate how to configure the software development tooling for different platforms. The Linux demonstrations are similar to the Windows demos but not identical, and the code we write can be run on either platform.

If you are a Windows user, don't skip over the Linux content because it does build on what you've already learned, and all you can do in Linux you can do in Windows. Unfortunately, the reverse cannot be said. When working in Windows, we will be taking advantage of Microsoft's Windows-specific tooling in the form of Visual Studio.

I apologize in advance to the Linux enthusiasts, but on the bright side, new, more sophisticated, and graphical tooling is continually being developed for Linux. After setting up our development tools, we'll create a simple program to test everything is working correctly. While doing this, we'll encounter unfamiliar concepts that you may not fully understand.

Don't worry if some of these ideas are foreign to you; I'll be explaining them fully in future courses. I'm doing it like this so we can quickly and easily test programming concepts as we learn them. Think of this like learning to drive, where you're getting straight behind the wheel before learning the road rules.

Before we get into writing code, I'll give a brief overview of why programming exists and some of the fundamental challenges facing software development where code needs to run on different operating systems. Then we'll look at how .NET has evolved to solve the multi-platform dilemma with a unified and consistent programming interface across the major operating systems currently in use.