I'm not too familiar with linux, but a year or two ago, I was trying to set up a rails development environment on a Ubuntu VM. I had quite a few challenges along the way, but one of them that I recall that confounded me for an hour or so was that I needed to install build-essentials, which was not documented in the guide I was using, nor was it marked as a dependency in whatever package I was actually trying to install.

When you install Visual Studio, generally it automatically installs anything you're missing, or at least tells you how to do it.