in this video i'm going to go over how to set up an environment for working with c on a windows machine so probably the easiest way to do it is to use microsoft visual studio because it's a text editor and a compiler all in one the text editor allows you to edit your source code and write your c programs and then the compiler turns it into an executable program and actually runs it for you it's a great environment to work with c on a windows machine so just go to google just type in microsoft visual studio and you could say c c plus plus and that should bring up with the first link this visual studio c c plus ide here and what you want to do is download the community edition here and that should say open file eventually so i'm going to say open file here i'll say yes i'll say continue and it downloads an installer program and then the installer program gets the installation going and then once once that's done which will take a while then you'll have visual studio installed which allows you to create your c programs and run them and so forth and so we'll just let it download install here and i'll skip over the part where it's just sort of downloading installing for you know 10 15 minutes or whatever it takes but i just want you to see what it looks like when we get there so you just click on this and just say make sure it's clicked and just say install here and then this is the part where it's going to take 10-15 minutes and it's kind of boring it doesn't really do anything so we'll just let this go and i'll just continue after it's done so eventually i get to hear where the installation is complete and it might ask you to restart it might not it kind of depends but we're going to say here not now maybe later and then we'll choose blue here it doesn't really matter which one you pick these are just different color schemes here and we'll say start visual studio so let's give it a second here so okay to get going just click on create a new project and then go to empty project here and we'll click on next and we're going to type in hello world for the project name and we'll say create here and with visual studio it really gives you a nice environment here to work with your code and so it organizes things by like source files and header files and different things like this and for this empty project what we're going to do is we're going to say right click on source files and we're going to say add new item so add new item and then instead of source.cpp here we're going to say hello dot c and it's really got to be a dot c extension so dot cpp that's going to be the default that it's going to use because that's for c plus but if we want it to be a c program specifically it's really important that we say whatever the file name is dot c then we'll say add and then i'll bring up the file here along with the ability to edit the file and create the file here so i'm actually going to zoom in just a little bit here and i'll say number sign include stdio.h then i'll say in main void and i'm going to write a little hello world program here so i'll say printf hello world exclamation mark n then i'm going to say return zero and then to actually run it i can just click play here so just click on the play button here and it'll compile it down here it'll show you the results of compiling the program and then it'll run it it'll bring it up in a command line terminal so a command line terminal will pop up and it'll say hello world there so you see hello world there and that's basically it so what happens is you write your code in this editor here and when you go to compile it by clicking play it's actually going to show the results of that compilation down here so if you have any errors in your program they're going to show up down here so if our c program is not correctly formatted let's say i forget a semicolon or something like that i'll just save this here if our c program is not correctly formatted we're going to get what's called a compilation error where the compiler is telling us like hey i can't turn your source code into an executable because something is wrong and if that happens you'll see that down here so it says there were build errors would you like to continue and run the latest successful build say no and then down here it'll show the errors and if you click on this it'll kind of give you some guidance as to where it is so it's trying to tell us like it's around here it's somewhere around here it says syntax error missing semicolon before return right so you say okay before the return we're missing a semicolon you go up here you'd fix it and you'd save it and then you run it and you'd be happy because it's now running and that's really it this is a basic environment for working with c on windows and it's the one that i would recommend using checkup portfolio courses.com where we'll help you build a portfolio that will impress employers including courses to help you develop c programming projects