Microsoft released VSBT to implement project compilation without installing Visual Studio.
Developers who have installed Visual Studio on the Microsoft platform can easily operate their own projects: Open the solution, modify the content, set all necessary files, configure and compile the project. However, in environments where Visual Studio is not installed, such as building servers or continuous delivery systems, it is very difficult to compile projects and solutions.
To solve this problem, Microsoft provided a variety of Tools, including Visual C ++ Build Tools for C ++ and managed code (Visual Basic and C #) microsoft Build Tools. Although this method provides support for major languages, providing two tools with similar names increases complexity and is easy to confuse. To remedy this problem, Microsoft recently released Visual Studio Build Tools (VSBT ).
VSBT combines the two tools provided earlier into an installation package. In addition, the installation package can also install the MFC/ATL support, Windows General C runtime environment, and a variety of Windows sdks. The VSBT installation package functions very similar to Visual Studio 2017, but it focuses on a variety of available build tools (Windows XP will be supported in future versions, but not yet ).
In this version, running the VSBT installer from the command line will not be able to obtain all functions identical to the similar Visual Studio installation package. For example, "-help" and "/?" are not supported. Adam Welch from Microsoft revealed that these features will be included in future versions. Currently, the best tutorial is the command line parameter description in the vs#rc reference guide. As before, Microsoft also provides an offline VSBT installation package. The entire offline package is about 2.5 GB.
Another feature to be provided in the next version of VSBT is support for Windows XP. The release time of the next version is not yet determined. Developers who want to directly download the installation package can click here.