Running the Examples
Many potential .NET developers are put off by the cost of Visual
Studio .NET. There’s no need to spend the big money
to buy Visual Studio .NET to run the examples in this book—in
fact, I’ve written all of them without using Visual
Studio .NET. All of the C# code can be compiled and run for free by
downloading the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, either Version 1.0 or
Version 1.1, from http://msdn.microsoft.com/
.
Here’s a simple “Hello, XML” example that you can try out using the C# compiler (as shown below):
using System; using System.Xml; public class HelloXML { public static void Main(string [ ] args) { XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(Console.Out); writer.WriteStartDocument( ); writer.WriteElementString("Hello", "XML"); writer.WriteEndDocument( ); writer.Close( ); } }
Once you have downloaded and installed the SDK, you can use the C# compiler, csc.exe, to compile any of the example C# code. The basic syntax for compiling a C# program called HelloXML.cs with the C# compiler is:
csc /debug /target:exe HelloXML.cs
This produces a .NET console executable called
HelloXML.exe, which can then be run just like
any Windows executable. The /debug
option causes
the compiler to produce an additional file, called
HelloXML.pdb, which contains debugging symbols.
The C# compiler can also be used to produce a .NET DLL with the
command-line options /target:library
.
The C# compiler can also compile multiple files at once by including
them on the command line. At least one class in the source files on
the command line must have a Main( )
method in
order to compile an executable. If more than one class contains a
Main( )
method, you can specify which one to use
by including the
/main
:classname
option
on the command line.
Running the HelloXML.exe
executable results in the following output:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="IBM437"?><Hello>XML</Hello>
For more information on the C# compiler options, simply type
csc /?
or csc /help
on the
command line. The .NET Framework SDK Documentation, which comes with
the .NET Framework SDK, provides more information on the other tools
that come with the SDK. It’s also a good first
resource for information on any of the .NET assemblies.
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