What is the difference between different teams in VS2010?

Question

What is the difference between the “Visual Studio x64 win64 command prompt”, the “visual studio x64 command console”, and the “visual studio command line” that appears in the Visual Studio 2010 Start menu?

For the most useful answer, let's clarify my level of ignorance: I'm closer to noob than to gurus in all Microsoft or the IDE in general. For a long time, an expert in Linux, editing source code in a text editor, manual Makefile, etc.

I am sure that the differences are simple, perhaps “obvious” to anyone with modest experience on VS2010.

Answer 1

Various batch files configure PATH , LIB , INCLUDE and LIBPATH so that you can easily run cl.exe and other build tools.

Answer 2

This answer is mainly about VS2013. Microsoft Documentation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229859%28v=vs.110%29.aspx states:

Starting with Visual Studio 2010, you can see several command prompts, depending on the version of Visual Studio and any additional SDKs that you have installed. For example, 64-bit versions of Visual Studio provide 32-bit and 64-bit command prompts. (The 32-bit and 64-bit versions of most tools are identical, but some tools make changes specific to 32-bit and 64-bit environments.)

He adds, pretty uselessly:

Check the documentation for the individual tools to determine which version of the command line you should use.

The following http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj153218.aspx lists these five commands:

• Developer Command Line for VS2013
• VS2013 ARM Cross Tools Command Line
• VS2013 x64 Cross Tools Command Line
• VS2013 x64 Basic Command Line Command
• VS2013 x86 Command Prompt

On my machine, only the 1st, 3rd and 5th of them are present, and they start accordingly:

% comspec% / k "C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \ Common7 \ Tools \ VsDevCmd.bat" "% comspec% / k" "C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \ VC \ vcvarsall.bat "" x86_amd64% comspec% / k "" C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0 \ VC \ vcvarsall.bat "" x86

To test environment variables, running the set command for the first and “X86 Native” shells gives the same results on my machine. And mmohamad answer tp The difference between VsDevCmd.bat and vcvarsall.bat in VS2012 is consistent with this.

But "x64 Cross" is different: the difference (excluding Path and LIBPATH for short):

  + CommandPromptType=Cross + FrameworkDIR64=C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64 + FrameworkVersion64=v4.0.30319 + Platform=x64 - LIB=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\LIB;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\lib\winv6.3\um\x86; + LIB=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\LIB\amd64;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\lib\winv6.3\um\x64;