How To Run Your C# Programmes

You can test your programme a number of ways. First, though, it has to be built.
This is when everything is checked to see if there are any errors. Try this:

• From the View menu at the top of Visual C# Express, click
  Output. You’ll see a window appear at the bottom.
• From the Build menu at the top of Visual C# Express, click Build
  Solution
• You should see the following report:

The final line is this:

Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped

That’s telling you that everything is OK.

Now try this:

• Delete the semicolon from the end of your line of code
• Click Build > Build Solution again
• Examine the output window

This time, you should see these two lines at the end of the report:

Compile complete — 1 errors, 0 warnings
Build: 0 succeeded or up-to-date, 1 failed, 0 skipped

So it’s telling you that it couldn’t build your solution because there was
1 error.

Put the semicolon back at the end of the line. Now click Debug from
the menu at the top of Visual C# Express. From the Debug menu, select Start
Debugging.

You should see a black DOS window appear and then disappear. Your programme
has run successfully!

To actually see your line of text, click Debug > Start Without Debugging.
You should now see this:

And that’s your programme! Have a look at the Solution Explorer on the right.
Because the project has been built, you’ll see more files under Debug:

Or this:

We now have a ConsoleApplication1.exe and ConsoleApplication1.pdb. The exe
file is an executable programme, and it appears in the bin/debug folder.
Switch back to Windows Explorer, if you still have it open. You’ll see the exe
file there:

You could, if you wanted, create a desktop shortcut to this exe file.
When you double click the desktop shortcut, the programme will run.

But that’s enough of Console Applications – we’ll move on to creating Windows
Applications.

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