Visual Studio Command Prompt vs. a regular command

问题:

When I open a Visual Studio command prompt (for example, opened with menu Start -> Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt), I get:

Setting environment for using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 x86 tools.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE>

What kind of tools are available, and what are the most common uses of this command prompt?

回答1:

It basically just sets several of the Visual Studio binary locations into the PATH environment variable for that command window instance. This means you can use all the various commands and tools without having to include the full paths.

There's a partial list of some of the tools available on MSDN in .NET Framework Tools and Tools (.NET Framework).

回答2:

The Visual Studio command prompt is a convenient way to access the command line tools that ship with the .NET Framework SDK and, if installed the, Windows Platform SDK tools.

By providing the Visual Studio command prompt, Microsoft allows you to run these tools without requiring your PATH, INCLUDE, LIB and LIBPATH environment variables to contain all the additional paths to the various folders where Visual Studio and the .NET SDK are installed. Instead, these folder references are added on the fly when you start the Visual Studio command prompt allowing you to run the tools.

For example, if you open a regular command prompt you cannot run xsd.exe without changing to the directory "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin". However, in the Visual Studio command prompt you can just type xsd.exe /?, and it works.

Please see the MSDN article .NET Framework Tools for a complete list of the tools provided with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and details on what they do.

回答3:

The Visual Studio command prompt has a few tools with it. Some tools are for repairing the install of Visual Studio. One of the tools I love using is for WCF. You type wcftestclient and you get a client to test your WCF services.

回答4:

The article The Visual Studio Command Prompt has a nice explanation:

Let's look at the "Visual Studio Command Prompt" in more detail.

It appears to just set the path for you and put you in (Ta Da!) the VC directory under Visual Studio. Not even the C# directory and certainly not the VB directory. I guess they assume that anyone who uses this tool is really hard core and programs directly against the hard drive with a magnifying glass and a magnet.

What it actually does is run this DOS command. (In my case.)

%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86

What does vcvarsall.bat do? Well, it sets the target compiler environment so you can compile code for a different processor.

回答5:

One use seems to be to call the XML Class Generator for using XSD schemas for serialization/deserialization:

XML Class Generator for C# using XSD for deserialization

回答6:

This link seems to have some good information:

Working at the Visual Studio Command Line