Where is Developer Command Prompt for VS2017? [closed]

Question

I have been trying to learn C recently. I've been using VS Code and run into a big problem. The start menu does not show a Developer Command Prompt and so I can't compile the code. I have searched everywhere for this program, I don't even have a folder named "Microsoft Visual Studio" under my Program Files (x86). I already tried reinstalling the software and nothing changes.

My problem: I can't find the VS Developer Command Prompt, which I would like to use to compile my code.

Answer 1

VSCode is much more light-weight and is, in essence, a completely different product. VSCode doesn't ship with a complete setup of MsBuild and of the compiler frameworks that ship with the full version of Visual Studio. You can install these alongside VSCode if You need them by installing "Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017", you can find the installer all the way at the bottom of the Visual Studio download page.

With these tools installed, you should be able to build your code. I'm not 100% convinced this will bring back the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt, but what this command prompt has which makes it work, is a number of pre-configured path statements to the right version of msbuild.exe and locations of other tools required to compile a .NET application. Manually configuring your user's PATH environment variable should work as well, after installing the right set of tools and SDKs.

Some variables that you may depend on, like:

VCIDEInstallDir=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\VC\
VCINSTALLDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\VC\
VisualStudioVersion=15.0
VS150COMNTOOLS=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\Tools\
VSCMD_ARG_app_plat=Desktop
VSCMD_ARG_HOST_ARCH=x86
VSCMD_ARG_TGT_ARCH=x86
VSCMD_VER=15.5.3
VSINSTALLDIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\
VSSDK150INSTALL=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\VSSDK

Have no direct equivalent in VSCode. If you are reliant on these, you'll need to also install Visual Studio (Community | Pro | Enterprise) on the same machine, or you will need to change your build scripts to break this dependency on items that are specific to the Visual Studio IDE.