Generate an exe for .NET Core Console Apps: .NET Core Quick Posts Part V

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

A Little Background

When you create a console application using .NET Core, you will notice that the exe will 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 us not to have .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 this helps.

You can find all .Net core posts here.