Running Current Project’s Executable

Provided by the FMS Development Team

Every now and then when I am working on a project, I find the need to just run the executable. I don’t want to debug it hence I use Ctrl + F5 which works great. However, if I have multiple projects in my solution then Visual Studio compiles all of them, while I just wait. It would be efficient to have a menu item to just run the executable, under Debug -> Start without compiling.

Steps

1. Start Visual Studio.
2. Navigate to menu Tools -> External Tools.
3. Press Add.
4. Change Title to “Start without compiling”.
5. For the Command, use “explorer.exe” (which is actually Windows Explorer).
6. For the Arguments, use this string : $(ProjectDir)bin\Debug\$(TargetName)$
   (TargetExt)
7. For the Initial Directory use this: $(TargetDir)
8. Press OK and return to Visual Studio.

Now click Tools -> “Start without compiling”.
If the executable is found, explore tries to run it and warns you about malicious code.
If this executable is something that would reformat the hard drive then don’t run it, otherwise go ahead and run it.

A slight twist to the above can be that for the arguments just use $(ProjectDir)bin\Debug\
And explorer will open that directory for you, instead of running the executable.

Now no more waiting for compilation or starting explorer separately and browsing to the directory.
Just click and run.