How to set up your C# and ASP.NET MVC development environment

For Windows, we recommend using Visual Studio Community Edition, which is a free IDE provided by Microsoft. It will install all the necessary components as well as the .NET Framework. You can also follow along with this tutorial using Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise.

First, let's create a simple ASP.NET MVC project. Visual Studio can create everything for you in a few simple clicks.

1. In the Menu click File > New > Project
2. This will open a dialog, in the Templates for Visual C# choose ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework)
3. At the bottom enter the name for the project such as WebApplicationTwilio and click Ok
4. In the next dialog select MVC , uncheck the box Host in Azure and click Ok

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using System.Web.Mvc;

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using Twilio.AspNet.Mvc;

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using Twilio.TwiML;

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namespace WebApplicationTwilio.Controllers

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{

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public class HomeController : TwilioController

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{

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public ActionResult Index()

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{

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var response = new VoiceResponse();

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response.Say("hello world");

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return TwiML(response);

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}

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}

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}

And that's it. You can press F5 and you should see a page displaying

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<Response>

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<Say>hello world</Say>

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</Response>

Now that you have a simple "Hello World!" in TwiML, your development environment is ready to go. But for most Twilio projects you'll want to install one more helpful tool: ngrok.

Most Twilio services use webhooks to communicate with your application. When Twilio receives an incoming phone call, for example, it reaches out to a URL in your application for instructions on how to handle the call.

When you're working on your application in your development environment, your app is only reachable by other programs on the same computer, so Twilio won't be able to talk to it.

ngrok is our favorite tool for solving this problem. Once started, it provides a unique URL on the ngrok.io domain which will forward incoming requests to your local development environment.

To start, head over to the ngrok download page and grab the binary for your operating system. (For more details on installing ngrok, read our ngrok guide.)

Once downloaded, run your ASP.NET MVC application and take note of the URL in the browser to find the port number your application is running on:

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