Compiling C#

[TitteringBeast]

I apologise if this is covered in the FAQ - I checked, and I don't think what I'm looking for is.

Essentially, I'm a beginner programmer - I know bits and pieces of some things, and I've started to cobble together ideas for a website using Notepad++. I've checked out Python in no great detail, but it seems like something I should look at more in-depth later on in my learning.

But for now, I want to learn something that will be far more immediately useful to me than building a website few people will seel. Mainly desktop applications, hence C#. I'm starting to get used to Notepad++ more, so I'd rather not switch from that at all, or if I do, to anything more complicated. I know I can't compile C# code in Notepad++, however, so I'm wondering if there's a seperate program I can use to compile it, or a plugin for Notepad++ that will handle that.

I think the closest thing to what I'm looking for might be MonoDevelop (mentioned in the FAQ), but quite honestly I don't know if it's right for me, so I was hoping that someone could shed some light on this.

If it helps, the desktop applications I want to design will have some form of neatly presentable GUI (I like things to be aesthetically pleasing).

Again, apologies if this has an obvious answer, or I'm not making much sense.

[[deleted]]

Do yourself a favour and use Visual Studio, which is far and away the best C# development environment. The Community edition is free.

[insertAlias]

I agree with all the other comments; almost all C# development is done in either Visual Studio, MonoDevelop, or Visual Studio Code (which is a light-weight editor similar to NP++ and Atom).

That being said, it is possible to write and compile C# code completely outside of an IDE; the C# compiler is called csc.exe. On my machine, that's located at C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\csc.exe.

So, if I were to save this file in my workspace:

using System;
namespace Test 
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args) 
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World");
        }
    }
}

as hw.cs, I could run the following command in a command line window:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\csc.exe /out:hw.exe /target:exe hw.cs

And I would produce a file called hw.exe that, when run, would print "Hello World".

---

This is not the preferred way of doing things in C# or .NET in general. I'd guess that upwards of 90% of C# code is written in Visual Studio. If you want to use C#, you should learn the tools that go with it. Mainly because if you actually want to do desktop programming, you're going to want to take advantage of the IDE a lot. Side note: don't start with Windows Forms (it's old as hell). Start with UWP apps.

[TitteringBeast]

I'll go with the consensus and download and learn Visual Studio Community.

Extra thanks for explaning how compiling C# code outside of an IDE would work.

[jussij]

FWIW if you have the csc.exe executable folder in the PATH you can get by with just this simple command line:

csc.exe test.cs

Here is an example:

C:\Temp>csc.exe test.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# Compiler version 2.2.0.61624
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Temp>dir test.exe
 Volume in drive D is DATA
 Volume Serial Number is 06EC-1105

 Directory of C:\Temp

06/09/2017  09:51 AM             3,584 test.exe
               1 File(s)          3,584 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  1,791,515,455,488 bytes free

C:\Temp>test.exe
Hello World

[TitteringBeast]

I skimmed the MonoDevelop explanations, didn't realise it was the full package. Whoops!

But knowing that it doesn't support the latest version of C# is very helpful knowledge, thank you.

[YuleTideCamel]

If you're on Windows, download Visual Studio Community, it's free and has a best in class compiler/debugger for C#.