During Build 2015 Microsoft announced a bunch of new tools aimed at helping developers build cross platform applications. Amongst the announcements, they let us know that ASP.NET was now available and ready to run on Mac and Linux natively.

Up until this point there has been a few different ways to get .NET applications running on Unix systems but none of them were truly native or supported by Microsoft.

With this announcement and the release of Visual Studio Code—Microsoft’s cross platform development tool—you can now develop cross platform .NET applications on your favourite operating system.

Today I will show you how to get started with setting up your .NET development environment on a Mac running Yosemite and show you how to build a Console and an ASP.NET MVC 6 call log application using Visual Studio Code and ASP.NET 5.

Feel free to download all the code from the Github repository if all you want to do is setup your local environment and not worry about writing all the application code.

Our tools

A Mac computer running Yosemite or above

Homebrew package manager

Node.Js

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Setup

To get started we need to make sure all the necessary tools are installed. If you are running on a Mac and still don’t have Homebrew installed you’re missing out, so download and install it from brew.sh.

Once homebrew is installed we can go ahead and download .NET Version Manager. This will install everything we need in order to run .NET as well as some useful tools we will talk about briefly.