Generating both dll and exe in MSVC

Question

For a visual C# project in microsoft visual studio IDE, what is the configuration settings to be used, so that it could generate both exe and dll outputs?

Sorry for my bad search for existing questions. I could see the same one asked in the below link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2466492/visual-studio-project-build-as-an-executable-and-a-dll As mentioned by Jared, how can we do the process of copying a exe to a dll? — inquisitive, Jun 13 '12 at 09:34

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 13 '12 at 09:45

2

What you want can be easily achieved using nant. You have to create a simple xml file that is the script and that can be easily executed through a batch file. Once you created them then it's very easy no more manual work, every time when you need to build the project all you have to do is just execute the script.

Here is an excellent tutorial about nant.

answered Jun 13 '12 at 09:45

VJAI

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+1 - this is great stuff. Having gone through the pain of creating a deploy script and multiple powershells to do much of the above, I wish I heard about this sooner! :) – Dr. Andrew Burnett-Thompson Jun 13 '12 at 09:51

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

As Darin points out in comments, there is no setting to do this. However, you can achieve it via build events and batch scripts

Create a pre-build event on the dll project to call a batch script
In the batch, copy the csproj for the dll project
- Modify the XML content of the copied csproj to change the output type to exe
- Modify the output directory of the copied csproj
Run this in Visual Studio

You will now get a copy of your csproj generated which outputs to exe. You can add the second csproj into visual studio and every time you build, it should synchronize the exe csproj and build it.

Some tips:

You can modify csproj's using Powershell. See here
You may want to modify all cs files in the copied csproj to be links

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 16 '13 at 07:36

I know this is an old question but it is possible to do a lot of things in the proj-files that is not possible in the user interface.

For this specific issue you just do like this:

Create a new project configuration, e.g. ReleaseExe
In the project's csprojfile you will find the following line
```
<OutputType>Library</OutputType>
```

After that line add the following line

<OutputType Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'ReleaseExe|AnyCPU'">Exe</OutputType>

Save, open the project and use batch build to build both the dll and exe

The nice thing is that you can use the Condition attibute on all tags in the project file. I have a project where I need to create two versions based on different 3rd party assemblies. To solve that I just add a condition to the reference tag.

<Reference Include="3rdParty" Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release1|AnyCPU'">
    <HintPath>Release1\3rdParty.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>
<Reference Include="3rdParty" Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release2|AnyCPU'">
    <HintPath>Release2\3rdParty.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

Generating both dll and exe in MSVC

3 Answers3