Installing Visual Basic

Visual Basic comes with the .NET SDK, which contains the compiler, the runtime, and project templates. Install the current LTS (long-term support) release, .NET 10, from dotnet.microsoft.com/download, or use a package manager.

Windows

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.10

If you want the visual Windows Forms designer, install Visual Studio Community (free) instead, with the .NET desktop development workload — it includes the SDK.

macOS and Linux

brew install --cask dotnet-sdk        # macOS
sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-10.0      # Ubuntu

Console apps and class libraries in Visual Basic run on macOS and Linux too; Windows Forms and WPF are Windows-only.

Check it works

$ dotnet --version
10.0.401

Your version number may be newer — that's fine.

Try it without installing

Online playgrounds such as .NET Fiddle (dotnetfiddle.net) run Visual Basic console programs in the browser — handy for trying the examples in this course.