Visual Studio Command Prompt vs. Regular Command Prompt?

Question

When I open a command prompt through Visual Studio, 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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

This link seems to have some good information:

Working at the Visual Studio Command Line

Answer 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.

Answer 4

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 here and here.

Answer 5

Th 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 this page from MSDN for a complete list of the tools provided with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and details on what they do.

Answer 6

This article has a nice explanation. Short, straight to the point and fun to read. http://visualbasic.about.com/b/2010/08/17/the-visual-studio-command-prompt.htm