Compiling C# code without access to Visual Studio
I’m not a developer and as such I don’t have a copy of Visual Studio but this evening I needed to compile somebody else’s C# code to produce a dynamic link library (DLL) and call it from a Windows PowerShell script. Somewhere back in my distant past I recall using Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, early versions of Visual Basic and even Modula-2 to make/link/compile executables but I’ve never used a modern compiled language (even on Linux I avoid rolling my own code and opt for RPM-based installations). So I downloaded and installed Visual C# 2005 Express Edition (plus service pack 1, plus hotfix to make it run on Windows Vista).
Sadly that didn’t get me anywhere - I’m totally confused in the Visual Studio IDE and anyway, the instructions I had told me to access the Visual Studio command prompt and run csc /t:library filename.cs.
It turns out that the Visual Studio Express Editions don’t include the Visual Studio command prompt but in any case, the C# compiler (csc.exe) is not part of Visual Studio but comes with the Microsoft.NET framework (on my system it is available at %systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\). Once I discovered the whereabouts of the compiler, compiling the code was a straightforward operation.
As for what I did with the DLL and PowerShell, I’ll save that for another post.
Posted: 20:12 on Wednesday 10 October 2007 under Microsoft.NET, Visual Studio.
Comments: 4
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Pingback from markwilson.it [formerly known as Mark’s (we)Blog] » Controlling Virtual Server 2005 R2 using Windows PowerShell
Time: Thursday 11 October 2007, 23:22
[…] to impersonate the COM security on the required object (I initially had some trouble with this but everything was fine once I located the compiler). I placed the resulting VSWrapperForPSH.dll file in […]
Comment from tamberg
Time: Thursday 1 November 2007, 11:33
For a complete example see http://blogs.oberon.ch/tamberg/2007-10-17/compiling-csharp-without-visual-studio.html
Comment from Outsourcing
Time: Friday 5 December 2008, 12:40
I tell you thing for sure…even developers like me don’t know how to compile from the command line. Microsoft provides such a good IDE (Visual Studio) you never have to do it.
Anyway you should have used Visual C# Express by opening the .sln file and click Build. The .sln file is the project file.
Comment from Mark Wilson
Time: Friday 5 December 2008, 12:53
Thanks for that tip - I can see that the VS IDE is powerful… but it takes some time to learn - your advice is really appreciated 
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