Difference between VsDevCmd.bat & vcvarsall.bat in VS2012

Question

What's the difference between:

• VsDevCmd.bat (Developer Command Prompt for VS2012)
• vcvarsall.bat (VS2012 x86\x64\ARM Native\Cross Tools Command Prompt)

I have a pretty good understanding of vcvarsall.bat as it's been part of Visual Studio for many previous versions. vcvarsall.bat was basically my goto tool for MsBuild even when building .NET projects even though it's technically part of Visual C++.

What I don't have a good understanding of is VsDevCmd.bat. It seems to be new with VS2012 and I'm not sure what it's purpose is. I've noticed it's not in the Visual C++ folder like vcvarsall.bat but it's in the Visual Studio Tools folder. Should I be doing doing my .NET msbuilds in this tool now? If so how do I setup the same kinds of x64\x86\ARM defaults like the vcvarsall.bat?

Answer 1

From my understanding and looking at the various batch scripts in VS2012:

vcvarsall.bat called with x86 (or just vcvarsall.bat with no option, which defaults to x86) is identical to the VsDevCmd.bat. The batch file that vcvarsall.bat calls when passed with the x86 option is

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat

This file is identical to the VsDevCmd.bat file that is located in

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat

which is what the developer command prompt calls when opened from the start menu.

Thus for more control on the platform it is better to call vcvarsall.bat with the appropriate option passed: x86 or amd64 or arm or x86_amd64 or x86_arm.