How I setup my Visual Studio website project ASP.NET MVC (non-Core)

This will be a long series of blog posts that will take you beyond the starter template provided by Visual Studio for making websites.

It’s easy to create a new website from the templates but these posts will take you beyond that as you need to add more to it in order to have a fully functional site with static pages for privacy policy, terms of service etc. along with having a robots.txt & sitemap.xml file.

These steps are what I use as my Starter Kit above and beyond what is provided in the templates.

I’m using the non-Core version for these posts but plan on creating a Core version that mimics the same steps.

I’m assuming that you already have Visual Studio loaded on your computer, if not please download a copy of Visual Studio here Download Visual Studio Community for Feee.

Step #1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework) w/Individual User Accounts

• Click File > New > Project in your Visual Studio app and you will see the screen below, make sure you select what I have highlighted in yellow and click the OK button.

• You will then move to the next screen, choose the Change Authentication button and make sure Individual User Accounts is selected then click the OK button and OK button again to create the project.

• (optional) I like to see all of my files in the project and it’s just a quirk of mine but I like it so if you want to follow me, highlight the project and click Show All Files icons and you will see all of the hidden files and folders in your project.

• I like to update the NuGet packages at this point because these templates are always behind, once you do that, make sure to do a Clean Solution and Rebuild Solution after the Nuget packages are updated to make sure everything compiles properly.

Step #2: Change my connection strings