Learning C# 3.0

Building and Running Applications

You can run your application at any time by selecting either Start or Start Without Debugging from the Debug menu, or you can accomplish the same results by pressing either F5 or Ctrl-F5, respectively. You can also start the program by clicking the Start icon () on the Standard toolbar.

For console applications, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, the advantage of running the program with Ctrl-F5 is that C# Express 2008 will open your application in a console window, display its results, and then add a line to press a key when you are ready. This keeps the window open until you’ve seen the results and pressed a key, at which point the window will close. If you choose Start (with debugging) on a console application, if the application doesn’t require any user input (as Hello World doesn’t), the console window may appear and disappear too quickly for you to see what it did.

You can build the program (that is, generate the .exe and .dll files) by selecting a command under the Build menu. You have the option of building the entire solution or only the currently selected project.