STEP ONE: SETUP
Create a folder on your hard drive that everything is going to go into; we'll refer to this as your "Dev" folder. It can be anywhere.

STEP TWO: INSTALLING .NET
Install .NET if you don't already have it (you may not need this at all as .Net often gets installed by other programs).

Go to Start: Control Panels: Add or Remove Programs 

In the list that appears, Look for "Microsoft

.NET Framework" followed by a version number. If you have Windows Vista installed, you are pretty much guaranteed to have at least Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (This tutorial is based off of .Net Framework 2.0, but should work in any version (I think)) It's common to have multiple versions, as shown below:



If you don't have it, no worries – just go to the Windows Update site http://www.update.microsoft.com, do a custom update and check off any .Net options. You may need to do this several times to get all the updates, etc. There's nothing to configure or worry about here; it's just tedious.