Installing Visual Studio

First google for Visual Studio. Any edition will really do. (Note: there are several editions (Links to an external site.) and even I get confused why there are several editions (Links to an external site.).) 

For many personal projects using the "Community" edition should be fine. IST computer support will install the Enterprise version for you.

Two advanced notes:
(1) we will be using a build system in the Foundation Course tutorials, so if you are comfortable working with another IDE like Eclipse, XCode, Vi(m) etc ... I am not going to be a stickler about it. (if you are new to this stick with VS).
(2) If you have access to Professional or Enterprise through Microsoft Imagine (Links to an external site.) ... go for it over Community, I personally use Enterprise to Team.

 

The first link is ok to click that should bring you to this page:

 

Download the Community 2015 button and continue.

(Note some people have reported issues with Chrome ... if that is the case use the Microsoft Edge browser)

 

You should get a prompt that looks something like this with instructions what is happening. Follow along and find the downloaded file and install it.

 

As a rule I always click "Show me all the options" and never let it install the default....

In this case that was helpful since I explicitly added Visual C++ Support, and Git support. The next two images illustrate this.

 

 

 

Then is does its thing for a while (grab an expresso.)

 

Once that is finished start it up. (it runs another tedious setup that takes time)

Sign in with your IST / UCF credentials.  It should be registered as a Microsoft account ... if it is not create a microsoft account under that address. (This will let you use it for 30 days, after that you will have to do this if you ignore the prompt)

 

(Somewhere in the install process I saw this prompt, I just ignored it....)

 

Ok now you should be set to develop!