I want to compile a .NET/C# project, but I don't want to install Visual Studio to do this.
What tools do I need and how can I compile the project?
I want to compile a .NET/C# project, but I don't want to install Visual Studio to do this.
What tools do I need and how can I compile the project?
Download and install the latest .NET Framework.
For example, you can use the installer for the .NET Framework 4.5 installer.
Open a command prompt and change into the installation directory of the .NET Framework.
For example:
cd \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4*
Use MSBuild.exe
to compile your solution.
For example:
msbuild "C:\Users\Oliver\Documents\My Project\My Project.sln" /t:Rebuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="Any CPU"
In case the project uses NuGet packages, you can follow these steps to retrieve them:
Download the NuGet.exe Command Line boostrapper and, for example, place it inside the solution directory.
Open a command prompt and change into the solution directory.
For example:
cd "C:\Users\Oliver\Documents\My Project"
Invoke NuGet.exe
to update the packages required for this solution:
NuGet.exe install "My Project/packages.config" -o packages/
MSBuild.exe
command line argument documentation. Yes, this is for a project that is already on the local machine (maybe downloaded from GitHub). As Ramhound mentions, csc.exe
would be the go-to tool to compile single files. csc.exe
is bundled with the .NET Framework as well. It is the core C# compiler and MSBuild probably just invokes it. Not sure about the client profile, but I would assume they are included with it.
Jun 7, 2013 at 14:49
csc.exe
needs to be included is because the Client Profile includes the XmlSerializer
class. This class generates serialization assemblies (using csc.exe
) at run-time.
If you want to avoid installing Visual Studio, you might want to try Mono, a cross-platform and open source .NET runtime and development framework. Mono is based on the published ECMA standard for C# and is directly compatible with pre-compiled C# applications.
Mono also includes a tool called XBuild which can fully replace MSBuild. See this article from the Mono project regarding porting a project from MSBuild to XBuild. A one-line description of XBuild from the Wiki:
xbuild is Mono's implementation of msbuild and it allows projects that have an msbuild file to be compiled natively on Linux.
Note that in addition to Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are also supported.
As from Windows 10 .NET Framework is already pre-installed, we now can compile (old) projects with the included MSBuild located at C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\
.
But recently I tried that with a .NET Framework 4.8 project created with Visual Studio 2022 and it did not work, got this warning:
Project file contains ToolsVersion="15.0". This toolset may be unknown or missing, in which case you may be able to resolve this by installing the appropriate version of MSBuild, or the build may have been forced to a particular ToolsVersion for policy reasons. Treating the project as if it had ToolsVersion="4.0". For more information, please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=291333.
And several error CS1056: Unexpected character '$'
errors, so in order to build it I had to follow these steps:
cd
to the repo's folder.msbuild [ProjectName].sln /t:Rebuild /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="Any CPU"
I hope this works for everyone who's trying to build a .NET Framework project without installing Visual Studio Community, which takes at least 2 GiB for developing these kind of applications.