Getting Started

The best and fastest way to get your hands dirty on Serenity is Serene, which is a starter application template.

Premium customers can also use StartSharp template which they can download from https://serenity-is members area.

You have a few options to install the Serene template:

Please check prerequisites below before trying to install Serene.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio, .NET, and TypeScript Versions

The application requires Visual Studio 2022+ with the most recent updates installed.

.NET 8 SDK is also only supported in Visual Studio 2022 17.8+.

An alternative option is to use the command line to create projects and work in Visual Studio Code if you don't have access to Visual Studio 2022+.

Please install .NET SDK from:

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download

As of writing, the recommended version of TypeScript is 4.8+

The project comes with a reference to a recent version of Microsoft.TypeScript.MSBuild package and it should be used by Visual Studio automatically.

You may also check https://www.typescriptlang.org/download for information on updating your TypeScript.

NodeJS / NPM

Node, and its package manager NPM is used for the following:

  • TypeScript typings (.d.ts) for libraries like jQuery and Bootstrap.
  • Installing and executing external tools like ESBuild

NodeJS and NPM LTS (Long Term Support) versions are required and you may download them from https://nodejs.org/en/

The application will check their versions on project creation and ask for confirmation to download and install them. Anyway, please check your versions manually by opening a command prompt:

> npm -v
8.19.2
> node -v
18.12.1

If you get an error, they might not be installed or not in the path. Also, confirm that the versions listed are higher than the ones shown above.

Visual Studio and External Web Tool Paths

Even if you have the correct Node / NPM installed, Visual Studio might still be trying to use the integrated, and older version of NodeJS.

Click Tools => Options, and then under Projects and Solutions => External Web Tools add C:\Program Files\nodejs to the top of the list by clicking plus folder icon and using the Up Arrow:

VS External Tools Path