Visual Studio is an IDE that we will use for writing both our backend and frontend code. With more than 20 years of existence, it is one of the most advanced development environments today.

There are plenty of IDEs, and it is up to you to try a few of them and keep the one you feel most comfortable with. For me, Visual Studio is the best choice when writing .NET code, so I chose to work with it throughout this book. Nevertheless, if you prefer a different IDE, keep using it.

Visual Studio Community edition is the free version of Visual Studio. It is more than enough for what we need, but if you're a part of an enterprise company or a big team, you might want to consider...

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment. It is a technology that enables you to run JavaScript code directly on your computer, without the need for a browser. It has gained popularity, Node.js is the technology responsible for these servers actually running, as well as being behind countless web development utilities. Throughout this book, we will use it for the latter option.

npm is a large repository of JavaScript libraries and utilities—almost 500,000 in the time of writing — that you can easily install and add to your project or computer.

To install Node.js, follow these steps:

1. Open your browser and navigate to https://nodejs.org/en/download.
2. Find the installer...

TypeScript is a programming language for large web applications. It adds new static typing features to JavaScript, as well as implementing upcoming features of the JavaScript language to enable developers to use them today.

Browsers are not familiar with TypeScript, so you must compile TypeScript files into JavaScript before deploying them. To do this, you will need to install TypeScript compiler (tsc), the TypeScript compiler.

To install TypeScript, follow the next steps:

1. Click Start | All Programs | Windows System | Command Prompt
2. Write the following command and press Enter:

npm install typescript -g

3. This will start the TypeScript installation
4. After a few seconds...

There are several different browsers in use today — Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Opera, and more. The differences between them get smaller all the time, so as a user, choosing this browser or the other is not such a big deal.

However, as a developer, it is an important decision — you will need to pick the one that is most developer-friendly and has the best developer tools. Today, the Chrome Developer Tools, also known as Chrome DevTools, are used by many developers and provide many strong capabilities. This is why we will be using Chrome throughout this book to demonstrate and debug code samples.

To install Google Chrome, do the following:

1. Open your browser and navigate to https://www.google...

Fiddler is a web-debugging proxy used to test web APIs. It enables us to make sure that our backend APIs work as expected, before integrating with the client-side. We will use it in this book to test the REST services that we will be creating using the ASP.NET Core Web API.

To install Fiddler, follow these steps:

1. Open your browser and navigate to https://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler
2. Fill in the required information and click the Download button
3. Run the downloaded file to start the installation wizard:

4. Move forward through the installation wizard until Fiddler is installed:

5. To test whether or not the installation succeeded, open Fiddler by clicking on Start | All Programs | Fiddler 4
6. Fiddler...

Developer tools are like a scalpel for the surgeon — without the correct one, you will work harder than needed, and risk making mistakes.

In this chapter, we learned about and installed the main tools that every full-stack developer needs. We've talked about both backend and frontend tools that will help us throughout this book. Now that everything is ready, we can continue on to deep-diving into the technologies themselves, and start building modern Web applications.