Table of Contents

Setting up your OS for development on Windows

This section provides a step-by-step guide for setting up your development environment on Windows.

To develop with MonoGame in C#, you must install the .NET SDK. As of MonoGame 3.8.2 the minimum supported version is .NET 8.

Important

If your chosen IDE for development is Visual Studio then you can skip this step as .NET 8 is included with the Visual Studio Installer.

Install .NET 8 SDK

You can follow the instructions below based on your operating system to install the .NET 8.0 SDK

  1. Navigate to https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0

    Download .NET For Windows

  2. Click the .NET SDK x64 download button to download. This will take you to the download page where the dotnet-sdk-8.x.yyy-win-x64.exe will download.

  3. When the download completes, run the dotnet-sdk-8.x.yyy-win-x64.exe installer and complete the steps to install .NET on your machine.

  4. When the installation completes, open a new Command Prompt window and run the command dotnet to verify the installation was successful.

    Verify Installation

Install additional workloads

If you intend to also work with platforms such as Android or iOS, you will need to install the additional .NET workload templates for those platforms which include additional features and simulators to support those platforms. Just run the command-line command for the platforms below you wish to install.

    dotnet workload install android
Note

You can use dotnet workload search to detect any other available workloads you wish to use.

Next Steps

Choose from one of the three IDE options on Windows:

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