Visual Studio takes a little while to install but it is a fairly easy process. Just download the install executable and work through the install wizard following the instructions below.
Download Visual Studio
Go to the following URL to download Visual Studio.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads
From there you can select the Community Edition which is totally free and will have all the tools you need to follow all of the examples throughout the book.
Click the Free Download button under Community to download the Community version of VS 2026.
The installer file named VisualStudioSetup.exe should now be in your Downloads folder.
Install Visual Studio
Run the Visual Installer in administrator mode by right clicking the Visual Studio install file and selecting “Run as administrator”.
Important: Make sure to run the Visual Studio Installer as Administrator as per the instructions above.
Although the installer will usually run fine in normal user mode, some workloads install system-level components (such as the .NET SDK, Windows SDK, IIS Express, and debugging tools) that require elevated permissions. Running as Administrator helps prevent incomplete installations or missing components. So, just to be on the safe side run it in admin mode.
If you get a popup of the User Account Control asking, “Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device?“, answer Yes.
When the Visual Studio Installer starts, click the Continue button to agree to the Microsoft Software License Terms.
If you already have a previous version of Visual Studio installed, choose Copy workloads, components, and settings from a previous installation. This ensures your development environment remains consistent and avoids missing components.
NOTE: If you choose to Copy workloads & components rather then install manually, .Net 10 will be installed along with the .Net 10 sdk.
If this is your first installation of Visual Studio, select Select workloads and components manually, and we will walk through the required workloads in the next section.
Either way click the Next button.
Install by: Selecting workloads and components manually
Selecting workloads
If you go the manual route, then on the Workloads tab, select the “ASP.Net and Web Development” and “Azure and AI development” workload components. We need the Azure and AI component because we will deploy apps in some chapters to Azure.
Selecting Individual Components
On the Individual components tab, make sure the .Net 10.0 Runtime is selected under the .Net category. It should be selected by default.
Also, make sure you have “SQL Server Express 2025 LocalDB” selected under the Cloud, database, and server category. We will make heavy use of this throughout the book so make sure you get it installed now so you don’t have to come back.
If you have a fast stable internet connection choose “Install while downloading” from the dropdown in the lower right hand corner. If you have a slower connection, you may want to select “Download all, then install”. Click the install button.
Install By: Coping workloads, components, and settings from a previous installation
Once you have selected “Copy workloads, components, and settings from a previous installation” and clicked the Next button, you might get a popup with the message, “The following packages aren’t available” followed by a list of packages that may have been renamed, removed, or are no longer supported.
Ignore this message and click the OK button.
Under the Workloads tab, make sure the “Azure and AI development” workload is checked as well as the “ASP.Net and web development” workload. If you have a fast stable internet connection choose “Install while downloading” from the dropdown in the lower right hand corner. If you have a slower connection, you may want to select “Download all, then install”. Click the install button.
Once you click the Install button the installer will show the status of Download and Install percentages complete as it goes.
Once the installation is complete, click the OK button in the “Done installing” popup dialogue.
Post Installation
Organize your environment: Visual Studio
Once the installation is complete, I like to drag all of the VS 2026 tool icon shortcuts I will need to the desktop.
Hit Ctrl-Esc on your keyboard to open the Windows Start Menu -> and click “All” to get to the All Apps view.
Scroll down to apps and folders that start with the letter ‘V’.
This is where it gets a little tricky if you had previous versions installed as in my case.
Starting with newer releases of Visual Studio, Microsoft adjusted how Start menu shortcuts and folders are created.
The screenshot above shows I had VS 2022 installed before I installed VS 2026.
So the structure was a VS 2022 shortcut icon to the executable of the IDE, and a VS 2022 folder with tools such as the VS 2022 Command Prompt and the VS 2022 Developer PowerShell shortcut.
One would expect there to be, after the VS 2026 install, a VS 2026 shortcut icon, and a VS 2026 tools folder.
But, Visual Studio now creates an un-versioned shortcut named “Visual Studio” that launches the latest installed version of Visual Studio and an un-versioned tools folder that point to all the latest installed version’s tools.
The thing that trips me up here is that there is a duplicate versioned VS 2026 tools folder, but no duplicate versioned shortcut icon to VS 2026. If we want a shortcut to startup specifically VS 2026, even after we install in the future say, VS 2030, we will need to create these shortcuts manually going forward.
Click and drag the New Visual Studio icon from the Start Menu -> All Apps view to the desktop and rename it Visual Studio 2026.
Next, open the un-versioned Visual Studio folder and drag the “Developer Command Prompt for VS” and “Developer PowerShell for VS” shortcut icons to the desktop and rename them to “Developer Command Prompt for VS 2026” and “Developer PowerShell for VS 2026” resepectively.
Verify the installation
Check the SDKs
Open Developer PowerShell for VS 2026 from the desktop shortcut icon we just created and run the following command to ensure the .Net 10 sdk was installed.
dotnet --list-sdksIn the output response you will see that the latest version of the .Net 10 sdk was installed; 10.0.103 at the time of this writing.
Check the Runtimes
From the command prompt, run the following command to ensure the .Net 10 runtime was installed.
dotnet --list-runtimesIn the output response you will see that the latest version of the .Net 10 runtime was installed; 10.0.3 at the time of this writing.
Check the SQL Server Express 2025 LocalDb versions
Run the following command from the command prompt to ensure the 2025 version of LocalDb was installed.
sqllocaldb versionsIn the output response you will see that the LocalDb 2025 version was indeed installed and in my case next to the previously installed 2022 and 2019 versions.
Connect to SQL Server Express 2025 LocalDb
Let’s connect to the new 2025 version of LocalDb. We could connect from Visual Studio’s SSOX (SQL Server object Explorer). But I am going to show how to do it in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).
If you haven’t installed SSMS go to the SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) section of my post, Installing SQL Server 2022 Express, and install it right now. You can find the SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) section in the TOC at the top of the article.
Connect to single LocalDb instance: 2025, no previous instances
If you have no previous LocalDb instances, probably because you did not install any versions of Visual Studio before 2026, such as 2022 or 2019, then SQL Server 2025 Local DB is your first LocalDb instance.
In the SSMS Object Explorer, click the Connect drop down and select Database Engine.
In the Connect to Server popup dialogue, under Server name, type in:(localdb)\MSSQLLocalDB.
Under Windows Authentication select Windows Authentication.
Click the Connect button.
Object Explorer will now show the connected 2025 LocalDb server.
The label name of the connected SQL Server 2025 LocalDb in the screenshot above is:
(localDb)\MSSQLLocalDB (SQL Server 17.0.1000.7)
(localDb)\MSSQLLocalDB is an instance name which points to an engine build number of 17.0.1000.7.
The build number is broken down into:Major.Minor.Build.Revision
The major version, 17 here, maps to SQL Server 2025.
Recall when I ran the command:sqllocaldb versions
from the command prompt it showed this mapping.
17.0.1000.7 -> maps to -> SQL Server 2025
In my case there are previous instances, 2022 and 2019.
So my instance name, (localDb)\MSSQLLocalDB, points to 2022. (Honestly I can’t remember why it does not point to 2019 if that was my original version).
But if this is your first instance, then the instance name (localDb)\MSSQLLocalDB should point to the 2025 LocalDb.
Connect to latest LocalDb instance: 2025, previous instances installed
LocalDb instance names work the exact opposite of how Visual Studio shortcut icons work.
As we saw earlier, the new un-versioned VS Studio shortcut icon in the Windows Start Menu always point to the latest version of Visual Studio.
But, once a LocalDb instance name is set, it’s set for good. If you install a later version of localDb, that previous instance name will still point to it’s original instance.
So in my case when I connect to a server name of
(localdb)\MSSQLLocalDB):
it still points to my 2022 version.
And I can still see all of my old databases in that instance and version.
In order to connect to the new 2025 localDb instance, we need to create a new [instance name/engine build] mapping.
We are going to run a command in PowerShell to create this mapping with the following syntax:
sqllocaldb create <instance-name> <instance-version>Open up PowerShell and run the following command.
(You may need to replace 17.0.1000.7 with your exact 17.x version from the results of the sqllocaldb versions command.)
sqllocaldb create MSSQLLocalDB2025 17.0.1000.7 -s
In the screenshot above you can see in the response output that an instance name of MSSQLLocalDB2025 was created and mapped to the V17 build engine and the new instance was started immediatly.
Now run the following command to see information about the new instance.
sqllocaldb info MSSQLLocalDB2025
Now let’s connect to the new instance in SSMS.
In the SSMS Object Explorer, select the Connect drop down and select Database Engine.
In the Connect to Server popup dialogue, under Server name, type in:(localdb)\MSSQLLocalDB2025.
Under Windows Authentication select Windows Authentication.
Click the Connect button.
Object Explorer will now show the connected 2025 LocalDb server.
Open Visual Studio 2026
Finally, click the desktop shortcut icon to Visual Studio 2026 we created earlier.
If you have a Microsoft account, sign in with it. If you don’t you can can create one or sign in with a GitHub account. GitHub is a popular source repository and uses Git for version control.
Signing in to Visual Studio with a Microsoft account (MSA) allows you to synchronize your personalized settings across devices.
This step is optional. If you prefer you may skip this step by clicking, “Skip and add accounts later”.
Wait while Microsoft signs you in. This can take quite a while.
Once you are signed in to Microsoft to sync your settings, either sign in to GitHub, or click “Maybe Later”.
Visual Studio 2026 will open. Close the GitHub Copilot window docked on the right, skim the what’s new tab if you like, and close that tab.
Click into the Git Changes tab docked in the right pane and close it for now.
That’s it. Your new Visual Studio 2026 environment should be good to go with the Solution Explorer window docked to the right.
Please bring back the Blue Theme!
If you have any experience with previous versions of Visual Studio, the first thing you will notice is the new dominant gray background. And, if you are anything like me, you hate it.
Visual Studio has had a dominant blue background ever since the late 1990s in the precursor to Visual Studio, Visual Interdev, before ASP.Net or ASP.Net Core. Back then we used the Visual Interdev IDE to develop web applications with Classic ASP.
For me all this started back in 1999. So I’ve been looking at the same color scheme for over 25 years. And I’m not about to change now.
Luckily, there is an extension that exists which can bring back that familiar blue feel called Blue Steal by Microsoft’s Mads Kristensen.
Let’s install that extension now and switch to that theme.
Click Extensions in the top toolbar of the Visual Studio IDE and from there select Manage Selections.
In the Extension Manager tab, click the Install button next to the Blue Steel Theme Pack result.
At the top of the Extension Manager tab, there will be a message that says, “Your changes are scheduled. The modifications will begin when Microsoft Visual Studio is closed.” So go ahead and close Visual Studio 2026 and restart it.
First you will see the VS Extension Installer initializing in the VSIX Installer wizard.
Once initialization is complete, click the Modify button in the VSIX Installer to install the Blue Steel Theme Pack.
Once the Modifications complete, click the Close button in the VSIX Installer and restart Visual Studio 2026.
Now click Tools in the top toolbar and select Options.
Select Blue Steel (Dark) as the color theme.
Close the options tab and that’s it. Visual Studio 2026 should be installed on your machine and ready to start creating web applications.
