Question

For a visual C# project in microsoft visual studio IDE, what is the configuration settings to be used, so that it could generate both exe and dll outputs?

Answer 1

As Darin points out in comments, there is no setting to do this. However, you can achieve it via build events and batch scripts

1. Create a pre-build event on the dll project to call a batch script
2. In the batch, copy the csproj for the dll project
   • Modify the XML content of the copied csproj to change the output type to exe
   • Modify the output directory of the copied csproj
3. Run this in Visual Studio

You will now get a copy of your csproj generated which outputs to exe. You can add the second csproj into visual studio and every time you build, it should synchronize the exe csproj and build it.

Some tips:

• You can modify csproj’s using Powershell. See here
• You may want to modify all cs files in the copied csproj to be links