Welcome to introduction to visual basic. This is the second course in the Introduction to Computer Programming with Visual Basic Specialization. This first module, we're going to talk about console input and output. We're actually going to roll up our sleeves and start coding. That's why you're all here. We're going to learn to use Visual Studio and we'll also learn to use console input and output. Some objectives here. I want to make sure by the time you're done with the first module, you can develop programs that read input from the user from the keyboard. You also should be able to develop programs that output information to the console. Think of the console as a command line. You should also be able to compile and run Visual Basic programs in Visual Studio. Lastly, you should be able to compile and run Visual Basic programs from the command line. Lesson 1 is really for Windows users. I want everyone to watch it, but if you're a Macintosh or a Linux person, you're not going to be able to do the things in lesson 1. Lesson 2 is more for you. Everyone will get their information covered through Lesson 1 and Lesson 2, so just bear with me. Lesson 1 is getting and using Visual Studio. What is Visual Studio? Visual Studio is Microsoft's integrated development environment, we call it an IDE, for developing programs. It includes an Editor, and the Editor has syntax highlighting. What that means is it will color code your syntax of your program as you're typing it. This makes it easier for a human to pick out different parts of the code. It also does code completion. Code completion is a lot like Google. When you're searching, as you're typing, it starts to suggest things. Code completion suggests your code. It makes it much faster to write code. Visual Studio also includes a debugger. A debugger is there so you can solve problems. There's a single button you can click to execute code and I'll show you that. You can also step through your code line by line. If something's not working, you can run your code line by line and then you can interrogate variables as you're in the middle of your program to see what their values are. Visual Studio at the time of this recording, is only useful for people on Windows. I say at the time it's recording because there's a Visual Studio for Mac, but it's really being developed and at this point it's mainly for mobile applications. For those of you on Windows 10, you can download Visual Studio 2019 and there's three different versions. There's the Community edition, the Professional Edition, and the Enterprise edition. If you go to this URL, the visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads that's on your screen, you'll see under Community, the one I've got circled here, it says free download. The other two say free trial. Those are paid versions. Community is terrific if you're a student, like you are, or you're building open source programs, so programs that you can still charge for them, but you're including the source code so the program can have a life of its own. It can be developed by the end-users. Professional and Enterprise are really designed for commercial software teams. Professional has some functionality for smaller teams, and Enterprise has some functionality for larger teams. But really, you can do everything we'll talk about and a lot more with the Community edition. You want to download that now. Once you've got Visual Studio installed, and if you haven't, pause this, install it, and come back. You're going to create a new project when you first started up, and there's lots of different templates. The template we'll use through this course is called a Console Application (.NET Core). I'll explain.NET Core a little bit more in the next lesson. But essentially,.NET Core, you'll see in the description on your screen is for creating a project that's a command line application that runs on.NET Core on Windows, Linux, or Macintosh OS. What that means is your visual basic code can be run on any platform that has.NET Core, which are these three: Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS. There are other kinds of application template you'll see in Visual Studio like Windows forums, ASP.NET applications, different applications, web services, that sort of thing, Azure projects. We're going to focus on core programming here. We're going to use the Console App. That's it for Lesson 1. Just a little overview. Visual Studio is a free integrated development environment from Microsoft. An IDE, as in integrated development environment, includes the editor and the debugger. Visual Studio only runs on Windows for the development of.NET Core Console Applications that we'll do here. If you're on Windows, make sure you've downloaded the application for Visual Studio, and in our next lesson, we'll talk about other folks, but you can also do what we'll do there on Windows. See you soon.
