Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Compiling Projects

Compiling a project (or building, in Visual Studio terminology) is the process that produces a .NET assembly starting from the project and source code (see Chapter 1, “Introducing .NET 2015”). An assembly can be a standalone application (an .exe assembly) or a .NET class library (a .dll assembly). To compile a project into an assembly, you need to click Build, Build ProjectName, where ProjectName is the name of your project. When you invoke this command, Visual Studio launches the Visual Basic command-line compiler (Vbc.exe) and provides this tool all the necessary command-line options. For solutions that contain different kinds of projects, Visual Studio launches MSBuild.exe, a command-line utility that can compile entire ...