Welcome To Windows Dev 😁

Until 2018, my entire career as a frontend developer I’d worked in Linux land, working on a LAMP, or on the MEAN, MEVN or MERN stacks. Here is my simple guide to help get you up and running – fast.

1. Install Virtualisation software

I use vmWare Tools, if you’re working on DotNet regularly I think the licence fee is a great investment in your day to day developer experience. My choice aside, Virtualbox is a great tool and is more than satisfactory for occasional use.

Configure a virtual machine with the highest recommended hardware settings. If you’re going to be running Visual Studio you’ll need as much power as you can get.

2. Download Windows

You’re going to need a licence key, if you’re doing Windows dev, I’d hope that you’re at an outfit where you are issued with an Azure account. In that case you should be able to obtain windows images and a licence key from there. If not, Microsoft offer 90-day images here: Edge Virtual Machines you can set everything up and then set a snapshot to roll back from.

3. Install Windows On Your Virtual Machine

4. Optimise your Build

If you’re going to be working in this environment you need to set it up so that it will run smoothly if you’ve got VMWare install VMWare Optimisation Tools This will tune your Windows environment and get rid of a lot of the services that you will not need in development.

If you’re using Virtualbox you’ll need to do add VirtualBox Guest Additions and then manually optimise some settings to improve the performance

Now Say Hello to your Windows Box

Complete steps 5 – 9 inside Windows

5. Install Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a beast, and no matter how powerful your mac is it’s probably going to eat your VM’s CPU for breakfast, I’d recommend disabling source control management within Visual Studio as it can tax your VM. Use git from inside Bash WSL, install GitBash, or use a GitGui like SourceTree.

6. Setup a Work folder in the root of the VMs C: drive and share it with your Mac

You could set it up anywhere but you’re going to be typing that path a lot so I’d recommend something like C:\projects I’d recommend running your code editor in your mac environment and editing the files in the shared folder but always build your frontend inside windows.

7. Install IIS

Press Windows and type Turn Windows Features On or Off and enable Internet Information Services.

Install the IIS Rewrite Module

Every CMS I’ve setup in dotnet needs this, it was a gotcha for me on the first couple of setups.

8. Install MySQL Express

That’s it, now you should have what you need to install your project.