What is csc2.exe?

Question

What is csc2?

Visual Studio 2013 ships with the C # compiler with the csc.exe command line in C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\Bin . Sometimes I used it to create small applications for applications, for example. csc hello-world.cs

Visual Studio 2015 still ships with csc.exe , as well as with the new csc2.exe in C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin . What is csc2.exe ? How is it different from csc.exe ?

Answer 1

This is part of Roslyn, the new open source .NET compiler platform.

On the CodePlex page:

Creating command line compilers

Note that in most situations, compilers will NOT be called through csc and vbc for performance reasons, but this is the easiest way to debug. Other entry points include:

• csc2.exe and vbc2.exe. These are very small executables that simply run or connect to the VBCSCompiler.exe process and pass command line arguments to it. This allows the VBCSCompiler.exe process to reuse loaded assemblies for multiple projects.

The source of csc2 can be found here . As you can see, this is just a very small app for beginners.