Generate an exe for the .Net Core console apps: .Net Core Quick posts part 5

You can find all .Net core posts here.

In this quick post, we will see how to create an exe from .Net Core console application.

Little background

When we create a console application using .Net Core, you will notice that the exe would not be created when you build the application.

Let us quickly create an application to check this.

I created a .Net Core console application and built the solution. If we open the debug folder, we can see everything except the exe:

Do not think it is a bug in .Net Core, but actually it is a feature. the dlls generated is nothing but the portable apps model which does not generate the exe. They are executed by the .Net Core shared run-time. You can just run the application by running the command dotnet run.

You can read nice explanation here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44038847/vs2017-compile-netcoreapp-as-exe

Generate the exe

But, If you really want to generate the exe then just run below command:

dotnet publish -c Debug -r win10-x64

Update: As per the comment below from Stig Schmidt Nielsson:

Fine tip, but one should consider to do a release or debug build. For release builds:

dotnet publish -c Release -r win10-x64

This command will generate the exe as you can see below:

This will create the stand alone apps which are similar to our old .Net applications. This allows not to have the .NET Core as the shared run-time in the target machines.

You can find valid run-time from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/rid-catalog#rid-graph

Hope it helps.