If you’ve been playing around a little bit with Solidity and testrpc it’s time to interact to an actual network. In case you’ve missed it, please see my Part 1 — Getting started with Ethereum & Solidity on Windows, to get started from scratch.

Since testrpc is just a simulation for our connectivity to the network, we need to get an actual client to do the real work. There are multiple clients to do so, but we’re going to use Geth for it here. Geth is the official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol and is the most common for people wanting to interact with the Ethereum network. Geth comes bundled with Mist, but we are going to install it separately so we can launch and interact with specific configurations and commands.

During installation, make sure to select ‘Developer tools’. We won’t get into any details for now, but better be prepared while we’re at it.

* Install the Developer tools while we’re at it.

After installation, open up a PowerShell window and verify it is installed correctly.