Question What exactly is the optional "Development tools for .NET" component in Visual Studio?

[rapadura]

The Visual Studio 2022 Installer has a .NET desktop development workload that includes this item:

* .NET desktop development tools - "Tools required to do .NET desktop development"

Confusingly, it also has this redundant-sounding optional item:

* Development tools for .NET - "Latest SDK, runtimes, and templates for developing .NET applications"

Toggling it doesn't seem to change anything in the Individual Components tab, but it adds about 300MB to the install size.

What exactly does it add? Do I need to check if all I want to do is create a simple Windows Forms application?

 

[JohnH]

If you remove it, do you only get .Net Framework project types, and not .Net 8/9 ones?

Only thing I could find was this list of components for each workload: Visual Studio Build Tools workload and component IDs