A response file is a text file that contains a set of compiler command-line switches.
When you execute CSC.exe, the compiler opens resonse files and use any switches
that are specified in them as though the switches were passed to CSC.exe on the
command line. You instruct the compiler to use a response file by specifying
its name on the command line prepended by a @ sign. For example, you could have
a response file called MyProject.rsp that contains the following text:
To execute CSC.exe to use these settings, you would invoke it as follows:
csc.exe @MyProject.rsp CodeFile1.cs CodeFile2.cs
This tells the C# compiler what to name the output file and what kind of target to
create. As you can see, response files are very convenient becuase you don't
have to manually express the desired command-line arguments each time you want
to compile your project.
The C# compiler supports multle response files. In addition to the files you explicitly
specify on the command line, the compiler automatically looks for files called
CSC.rsp. When you run CSC.exe, it looks in the current directory for a local
CSC.rsp file - you sould place any project-specific settings in this file. The
compiler also looks in the directory containing the CSC.exe file for a global
CSC.rsp file. Settings that you want applied to all of you projects should go
in this file.
When you install the .NET Framework, it installs a default global CSC.rsp file in
the %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vX.X.Xdirectory (where X.X.X is the version of the .NET Framework you have installed). The 4.0 version
of the file contains the following switches:
# This file contains command-line options that the C#
# command line compiler (CSC) will process as part
# of every compilation, unless the "/noconfig" option
# is specified.
# Reference the common Framework libraries
Becuase the global CSC.rsp file references all of the assemblies listed, you do not
need to explicitly reference these assemblies by using the C# compiler's /reference