C# 6 and .NET Core 1.0: Modern Cross-Platform Development

Building console applications

Console applications are text based and are run at the Command Prompt. They typically perform simple tasks that need to be scripted such as compiling a file or encrypting a section of a configuration file. They can have arguments passed to them to control their behavior, for example, to compile a source file into a shared library:

csc my.cs /target:library

To encrypt the database connection strings section in a Web.config file, use the following command:

aspnet_regiis –pdf "connectionStrings" "c:\mywebsite\"

Displaying output to the user

The two most common tasks that a console application performs are writing and reading lines. We have already been using the WriteLine method to output. If we didn't want a carriage ...