I'd like to spend some time working on the experience for a new contributor who misses some of our dependencies. You end up getting pretty deep into a build before you discover things like missing .net core, or that you have a globally installed version of typescript/tslint that is not compatible. The error messages you get from the build are hard to interpret.

Proposed Solution

Add checks early in the build process to look for the correct version of all dependencies and emit a clear error message.

Other

Here's an example that I think is the result of not installing .net core:

FAIL test/init.test.js (6.873s)
aws-cdk: ● verify "future flags" are added to cdk.json
aws-cdk: Could not add project AwsCdkTestHnYKc5.csproj to solution AwsCdkTestHnYKc5.sln. Error code: 127
aws-cdk: at ChildProcess. (../../../../../../private/var/folders/hw/7qx39xm96h719bjttttbf_903hyzmd/T/aws-cdk-testHnYKc5/tmp/add-project.hook.ts:29:16)

• [ x] 👋 I may be able to implement this feature request

This is a 🚀 Feature Request