Visual Studio Command Prompt vs. a regular command prompt?

Question

When I open a Visual Studio command prompt (for example, opened with menu Start -> Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt), I get:

Setting environment for using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 x86 tools.  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE> 

What kind of tools are available, and what are the most common uses of this command prompt?

Answer 1

It basically just sets several of the Visual Studio binary locations into the PATH environment variable for that command window instance. This means you can use all the various commands and tools without having to include the full paths.

There's a partial list of some of the tools available on MSDN in .NET Framework Tools and Tools (.NET Framework).

Answer 2

The Visual Studio command prompt is a convenient way to access the command line tools that ship with the .NET Framework SDK and, if installed the, Windows Platform SDK tools.

By providing the Visual Studio command prompt, Microsoft allows you to run these tools without requiring your PATH, INCLUDE, LIB and LIBPATH environment variables to contain all the additional paths to the various folders where Visual Studio and the .NET SDK are installed. Instead, these folder references are added on the fly when you start the Visual Studio command prompt allowing you to run the tools.

For example, if you open a regular command prompt you cannot run xsd.exe without changing to the directory "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin". However, in the Visual Studio command prompt you can just type xsd.exe /?, and it works.

Please see the MSDN article .NET Framework Tools for a complete list of the tools provided with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and details on what they do.