Developer Environment Setup
This tutorial will help you get up and running with a development environment on Windows, with the recommended IDE, Visual Studio, and some optional extensions to further enhance your development experience.
- Install Visual Studio.
- Optional Extensions for Visual Studio 2022.
- Linux/Mac Users.
Install Visual Studio
We recommend that you install Visual Studio 2022 for the best development experience. Once the Visual Studio Installer opens, go to the Workloads tab and select "ASP.NET and web development".
In the Individual components tab, select ".NET 9 runtime" and ".NET 9 WebAssembly Build Tools".
Keep in mind that ".NET 9 WebAssembly Build Tools" is not required, but some special libraries need it installed. It's better to install the tool at the beginning so you don't encounter any unsolvable errors that do not come from your code.
Optional Extensions for Visual Studio 2022
To install a new extension, click on Extensions => Manage Extensions. A new window will pop up, and you can click on Browse to look for the extensions.
The first extension we are going to mention is Bundler & Minifier 2022+. This extension allows you to quickly minify CSS files on save.
The second extension that will help you with your Blazor project is SwitchStartupProject for VS 2022. When developing a Blazor project, you might separate your code into multiple small projects. This extension allows you to run all required projects with different configuration profiles, helping you get everything up and running with just one click.
In later updates of Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft has supported running multiple projects to some extent. However, we found that Microsoft has not covered all the features that this extension provides, so it is still a viable choice for developers.
Linux/Mac Users
.NET is a cross-platform framework, so you will have no problem using Linux or Mac to develop a Blazor project. There are other IDEs, like Rider, available for developing a Blazor project.
