Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Compiling Projects

Compiling a project (or building according to the Visual Studio terminology) is the process that produces a .NET assembly starting from your project and source code (according to the .NET architecture described in Chapter 1, “Introducing the .NET Framework 4.0”). An assembly can be a standalone application (.exe assembly) or a .NET class library (.dll assembly). To compile your project into an assembly you need to click the Build command in the Build menu. Notice that the Build command is followed by the name of your project. When invoking this command, Visual Studio launches, behind the scenes, the Visual Basic command-line compiler (Vbc.exe) and provides this tool all the necessary command-line options. For solutions containing ...