c# - The difference between build and publish in VS?

Question

I am a little confused about the difference between build and publish in the visual studio.

What is the difference between building a program and publishing a program?

Answer 1

There are some significant differences between Build and Publish targeting .NET Framework application vs .NET Core applications:

Building .NET Framework applications will generate the same files as Publish. It will create all the dependencies as binaries including external dependencies (NuGet packages, for instance). So the product of dotnet build is ready to be transferred to another machine to run.

Building .NET Core applications, if the project has third-party dependencies, such as libraries from NuGet, they're resolved from the NuGet cache and aren't available with the project's built output. Therefore the product of dotnet build isn't ready to be transferred to another machine to run. You need to run Publish to get all 3rd party dependencies as binaries in output folder.