Install .NET Core, ASP.NET Core

Here you will learn how to install .NET Core (now simply known as ".NET") and ASP.NET Core (now simply referred to as ASP.NET in the unified ".NET" platform) to develop .NET applications.

Here we will install the latest version of .NET which is .NET 7 as of this writing.

.NET Core can be installed in two ways:

By installing Visual Studio 2022
By installing .NET Core SDK (Software Development Kit)

.NET Core installer already contains ASP.NET Core libraries, so there is no separate installer for ASP.NET Core. However, you can install the required NuGet packages for the features you require for your ASP.NET Core applications later on.

Install Visual Studio

The latest version of Visual Studio comes with .NET 7 SDK, so you don't need to install it separately if you use Visual Studio 2022 for .NET Core applications.

Download the latest version of Visual Studio from here. Select the appropriate edition as per your license. The community edition is free for students, open-source contributors, and individuals.

If you already have Visual Studio 2022 then you can update it by opening Visual Studio Installer and modify Visual Studio 2002 and add workload.

During installation, select "ASP.NET and web development" workload. This will install .NET 7 SDK along with Visual Studio.

Once installed, you can verify it by opening a command prompt (or terminal in Mac) and type dotnet --version and press Enter. This will display the installed version and usage information, as shown below.

Install .NET Core SDK

If you want to use other IDE, such as Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, etc. to develop, restore, build, and run .NET Core application, then you need to install .NET 6/7 SDK separately.

To download the latest version of .NET Core, go to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download and select the platform you are using. As of this writing, the latest version of .NET Core is .NET 7. However, .NET 6 has a long term support so you can install that too. The .NET 7 has some more features but both are same for the development.

Click on the .NET SDK x64 button to download the latest version of .NET Core SDK installer for your OS.

After downloading the installer, click on it to start the installation.

After the installation of .NET SDK, you can start developing any type of .NET Core or ASP.NET Core web applications.