 My name is Dante Gagné and I'm here to kick off the Connect Learn series for Universal Windows Platform Application Development. Over the course of this series, I'm gonna help you get Visual Studio onto your machine and get you started on creating your first Universal Windows applications. In this first video, we're gonna focus on just installing Visual Studio and taking a brief look at both Visual Studio and Blend, the two tools that'll be invaluable for your Universal Windows application development. Now on this machine, I'm gonna be installing the Enterprise Edition. Now, if you want to, the Community Edition also works and most of the things that we show over this series will work in either edition. But for now, I'm using the Enterprise Edition, so let's go ahead and start with that. So I'm already up here at VisualStudio.com and you can see already over here on the left is the button to install Community 2015. This is the free edition that's available for everybody and most of the things that I show you over this series are available in either Community or the Enterprise. But I'm gonna scroll down just a little bit further and download the Enterprise Edition. Once it comes up, the Universal Windows platform tools are not installed by default. So always make sure when you're installing to switch over to a custom install, come over to the next page and check the Universal Windows app development tools. Once these are on the machine, you'll be able to start working with the Universal Windows platform. Once you're here, just click install and get ready to go. Now I'm not gonna install here because it does take a few minutes, but we're gonna switch over to my other machine where I already have everything installed. I've already brought up Visual Studio and again, this is the Enterprise Edition. The first thing I wanna help you do is make sure that you've got everything installed correctly. Now, very easily, all I need to do is go to New Project and once New Project dialog comes up, the first thing I wanna make sure I have is the blank app Universal Windows. This is a Universal Windows platform application. If this is not there, you're gonna wanna go into your control panel and modify the Visual Studio installation and make sure you add the Universal Windows platform tools. Whenever you update Visual Studio, it will update any of the modules that you have for it at the same time. So if you had the Universal Windows tools installed when you installed Visual Studio, if you add the update on top of it, it will also bring Universal Windows platform tools to the latest version. As long as you've got Universal Windows here in your New Project dialog, you've got all the tools installed and you're ready to go. Now, when you install Visual Studio, you're gonna actually get two tools. You're gonna get Visual Studio 2015 and you're gonna get Blend for Visual Studio 2015 and a common question gets asked, which one do I use? Well, in a lot of ways, it's a matter of preference. Blend really shines when you're working with the design surface. So if you wanna drag out your controls, try to get all your controls aligned nicely and things like that, that's where Blend's strength really shines through. If you're the kind of developer who prefers to work directly in the XAML, typing each character using IntelliSense and taking advantage of the coding abilities of Visual Studio, that's where Visual Studio's a little bit stronger. But honestly, either one works. The designer is available in Visual Studio and the coding tools are available in Blend. Over time, you'll play with the two tools and I'm sure you'll get more comfortable in whichever one you like. Another question that frequently gets asked is, what happens if my development house is one that can't move up to Windows 10? Naturally, development on Windows 10 is gonna be the best option, but you can still do universal Windows application development on Windows 8 or 8.1, you can actually even go as far back as Windows 7. If you're on Windows 8 or 8.1, you're only gonna be able to deploy your application to emulators or local devices. Which means you're not gonna be able to use the design surface and you're not gonna be able to side load the application onto your development box. You can still develop that way, but it's not the optimal situation. On Windows 7, the emulators are not available either. So on that device, you're going to need a separate device, say some other universal Windows application device to deploy to as you're going along. So now we've got Visual Studio on your machine and you know you've got the universal Windows tools. In the next video, we're gonna be going into actually creating a video and taking a look at Visual Studio and Blend, so you understand the environment that we're gonna be working with. We'll see you next time.