Getting started with Ethereum & Solidity development on Windows can be somewhat daunting as most tools are designed for linux. Coming from a Microsoft background I do prefer some of my familiar tools to avoid the additional hurdles. After playing around for a bit, it’s actually quite easy to get started. So let me guide you setting-up your Windows environment and get yourself ready for developing your first smart contract on Ethereum.

The tools we’re going use for it are;

Default installation for these will do just fine, but at least make sure that (Node and Git) are added to the PATH variables on your system.

Now that we’ve got our basics, let’s continue installing the rest of our tools via Node.js (which we’ve just installed). Open up a PowerShell window, with administrative access, to execute the following commands.

npm install -g npm

npm install -g windows-build-tools

npm install -g ethereumjs-testrpc truffle

The windows-build-tools are required to compile native Node modules. And the combination of ethereumjs-testrpc together with the truffle framework, will basically give you everything you need to start developing right away. We’ll follow up on those later on.

*Make sure you’ve got everything installed correctly.

If everything is OK, we can now continue to Visual Studio Code and install one more extension for Solidity. You can either search for it in the Extension marketplace or directly from the terminal;