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Are there any light weight tools (preferably portable so I can put it in a memory stick) that can compile C# code snippets? I don't want to load Visual Studio, create a project and all to test a small code snippet.


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closed as off-topic by meagar, Cupcake, gotqn, Pinal, jww Jul 13 at 6:31



See stackoverflow.com/questions/2775055/… –  scobi Jul 29 '11 at 16:26

3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote accepted

How about http://rextester.com/rundotnet?

This is online - so always available - downsides are it's a little slow, so good for trying out simple things quickly - not so great if you're doing anything more complex.

Alternatively if you want an offline approach try Linq Pad


Although it was primarily created to debug LINQ statements - it actually works as a great lightweight general purpose IDE.

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I never realized we could use LINQPad as a general purpose IDE. It works great! –  tempid Jun 23 '11 at 16:56

SnippetCompiler would be one, though it hasn't been updated for a while so could be out of date.

Edit: See Looking for replacement for Snippet Compiler for more up-to-date alternatives

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Looks good but it hasn't been updated since 2007 and no .NET 4 support. –  tempid Jun 23 '11 at 15:58

I have created a lightweight version of Visual Studio. It is essentially just the packages required to get MSBuild.exe working.

The installer is a PowerShell script that sets the necessary variables, registry keys and files.


Visual Studio 2013

790 MB


168 MB

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