Technical requirements

This being an introductory chapter, there will be no meaningful code samples, as we'll be covering the high-level concepts and vocabulary of networks to establish a clear foundation for the rest of the book. However, in this chapter, we'll be discussing the System.Net class library provided by .NET Core. While this discussion will be happening at a very high level, it would be a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with the development tools made available to you by Microsoft Visual Studio Community edition. This is free to use, and provides a rich feature suite out of the box, with broad support for .NET Core project management and administration provided out of the box. As we discuss some of the libraries provided within the .NET Core tools, I encourage you to investigate using the Visual Studio IDE to include those libraries into your project and begin exploring them through the IDE's IntelliSense.