To get the most out of this book

The ideal reader should be familiar with the C# programming language and the Visual Studio IDE. Knowledge of object-oriented programming, classes, and LINQ will be particularly helpful.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Visual Studio 2022 v17.8 or higher	Windows
.NET 8 SDK

This book works with any edition of Visual Studio from 2022 v17.8 onward, including Visual Studio Community. You can download Visual Studio from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/.

The latest version of the .NET 8 SDK can be downloaded from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Many chapters feature step-by-step instructions that you can follow along with by using the beginning code for a chapter to produce the code featured in the chapter’s final code folder. You can also keep an eye on other code you work with as you read the book and think about how the topics apply to that code. However, you may want to refrain from applying your refactoring techniques to real-world codebases until you’ve read the chapters covering safely testing your code.