CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010visual-studio
Pascal
Pascal

Reputation: 12885

Working directory vs output path in visual studio

What is the difference of the working directory vs the output path in visual studio?

Is it bad to set both setting to the same directory like '....\bin\'

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4185

Answers (2)

Fatih
Fatih

Reputation: 82

By default, working directory is the output directory. Both can be changed, you can set another directory or common directory for all projects for output directory that determines a relative path for the output file that might be an executable or a static library.

Working directory also provides a relative path to put files that are used by the program. You can put a log file into a place that you can use its directory as a relative path in the code instead of absolute path. If your working directory is myproject\src and your log file is in myproject\src\log\log.txt then you can open or write the log file with log\log.txt in the code rather than c:\blabla\myproject\src\log\log.txt.

Upvotes: 0

Haseeb Asif
Haseeb Asif

Reputation: 1786

By default they are the same. Assuming you're debugging some application it will be bin\debug.

Output Directory is where your output files goes. By default, Visual Studio builds each project in a solution in its own folder inside the solution. You can change the build output paths of your projects to force all outputs to be placed in the same folder

Working Directory is the location which Specifies the working directory of the program being debugged. It is the default place in which a program is looking up it's files. Normally the working directory is the directory the application is launched from \bin\debug by default.

So every opened file will be opened relative to the working folder.Let's say if you have an application installed in c:\myapp with all lib files in the same directory then you will set your working directory to myapp folder and you can do so from project properties.

Upvotes: 3

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