CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvcvisual-studiobuildiis-express
user3163495
user3163495

Reputation: 3518

What is the purpose of "building" a .NET MVC application if it runs fine without it?

I have a simple MVC Web application in the .NET Framework. To run it, I can click the green arrow ("play" button) in Visual Studio, which does a "build" and starts a Web browser pointing to the application.

Or, I can just start up IIS Express with the proper command line options, and navigate to localhost:8080 in a browser and run the application without a "build".

What is the purpose of "building" the application in Visual Studio if it runs fine without it?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 91

Answers (1)

Tomas Aschan
Tomas Aschan

Reputation: 60564

The simple answer is that it doesn't run without the build step; your assumptions are wrong.

However, Visual Studio continuously monitors your source files and compiles them, e.g. to be able to show intellisense suggestions and compiler errors while you type. This means that there are in fact compiled binaries based on your source somewhere, maybe just not in the bin folder under your project root (that somewhere might be in memory, or in some cache location on disk, depending on circumstances out of scope for this question).

It's also very likely that you've previously built your application, resulting in binaries in your bin folder, even if you didn't do it with the purpose of running the application right after. In either case, if you get it working with IIS Express it's because it can find compiled binaries somewhere, and run those.

The main reason to have Visual Studio explicitly rebuild your app when you hit play, is to make sure that you're running the latest version of your code. Sure, it takes a few extra seconds every time you start the debugger, but it's nothing compared to the time you'd lose trying to track down a bug that you've already fixed in your code, but which still manifests in the running application, because the running application is an outdated version. (It also makes things like stepping through the code much less confusing, since, again, the source code on file will always be in sync with the running application.)

Upvotes: 1

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