Creating the program template

To begin, make a new project in Visual Studio. We'll keep it super simple. Go to File > New > Project.; Ctrl + Shift + N is the key combination, of course. This will bring up the New Project window:

Figure 3.1: Setting up a new project

From this list, make sure you have Visual C# selected as a template, then select Console App. We'll just use a simple console app here for speed. You can leave the other settings as they are and click on OK. This generates a basic template:

using System; 
using System.Collections.Generic; 
using System.Linq; 
using System.Text; 
using System.Threading.Tasks; 
 
namespace ConsoleApp1 
{ 
    class Program 
    { 
        static void Main(string[] args) 
        { 
        } 
    } 
} 

The thing I like about this version of Visual Studio is that it is very fast. In the previous version, this process would sometimes take what seemed like a minute. The first thing that we're going to do is simplify this to just what we need. So...