Creating Executable from .Net Core Application

.Net Core applications by default will create .dll executables, in this post we shall see how to explicitly create a .exe using .Net Core, in the next post we will see how to use this .Exe and create a Docker image. 

Let’s start by creating a .Net Core Console App using Visual Studio.

When you build the application you can see that it does not create an .exe file, instead it creates a .dll file HelloExe.dll. In .Net Framework console applications will create a .exe file but not any more in .Net Core

To create an .exe file we need to publish the project, either using a command or using Visual Studio
We can use the following commands

HelloExe>dotnet publish -c Debug -r win10-x64

Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 16.4.0+e901037fe for .NET Core
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

  Restore completed in 162.06 ms for C:\HelloExe\HelloExe.csproj.
  HelloExe -> C:\\HelloExe\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\win10-x64\HelloExe.dll
  HelloExe -> C: \HelloExe\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\win10-x64\publish\

Now the .exe file will be created in the target folder, we can test the exe by invoking it from the command prompt as follows.
C:\HelloExe\bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.1\win10-x64>HelloExe.exe
Hello World from .Net Core

To create the .exe in Release mode we can use the command.
HelloExe>dotnet publish -c Release -r win10-x64

Alternatively, we can publish the .exe from Visual Studio also.
Right-click the project and select Publish
Choose the Folder publish option and select a target folder to publish. Configure Publish settings as follows.

Once configured, click on Publish
This will build and publish the HelloExe.exe file as follows.