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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

I find it really strange that there is no longer a stand alone compiler with dotnetcore. There is also an alarmingly low number of .net devs that even know that csc exists, which is a shame because it gives you a lot more flexibility when building your projects and is a lot faster than msbuild.

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Having been taught programming at university with command line tools (Ocaml, then C with GGC on Linux) I've naturally gone the same way when self-learning C# on Windows: notepad + Powershell + csc.exe I found somewhere within .net framework installation folders. I sticked with it for simple programs and started using Visual Studio 2008 only when learning GUI programming.

So I always find strange all the C# tutorials and books starting straight out with Visual Studio: this software is often updated with major visual changes thus rendering screenshots obsolete and there is a lot of visual complexity involved especially for beginners in both C# and programming. On the other hand the CLI interface is pretty stable, simple to use for small programs with few references -- and it's actually force one to understand what a referenced dll is -- and involve less magic.

When I did a bit of programming in Java, I was using Intellij. I found that starting with the IDE made learning the fundamentals harder. I later switched to Sublime and a command prompt, and found the process of pushing through command line errors to be more instructive.

Merging csproj files in source control is also a pain. I think they tried to get rid of sln and csproj files but got vetoed by the community.

I did the same thing with Java, for the longest time. Makefiles invoking javac, almost the same as I did for my C/C++ programs. It does start to break down once you start to get into more heavy-weight programs. I wouldn't even want to see what a hand-made makefile for one of my C# solutions that has a couple dozen projects and a few hundred code files would look like...

A while ago I wrote a batch script that assembled a project with csc instead of using Visual Studio. This was so easy and refreshing to work with. Source control worked, build times were incredibly fast and the result was independent of Visual Studio settings.

I really want my good old makefiles back for C#. For build management Visual Studio adds a lot of complexity and weird behaviors.

I wrote a couple of months ago about using make with .net (the focus is on make):

http://flukus.github.io/2016/11/30/2016_11_30_Rediscovering-...

The problem is that I still need VS for debugging, which means build via msbuild. I've heard .net comes with a cmd line debugger (that's compatible with gdb even), though I've never used it.

Those are msbuild settings, not visual studio settings.

My point was that, in a team, the output of the build depends on Visual Studio settings of each developer.

Does Visual Studio not come with nmake anymore? While I prefer BSD make, nmake wasn't half bad. Had all the essentials and then some.

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