[at_a_remove]

Complete n00b question -- you can do that?

The last time I touched anything .NET was about a decade ago. My somewhat old-school superiors were unimpressed with the ability to come up with a plain .exe at the end of the process. My lack of familiarity with how Visual Studio had evolved certainly played into it; the IDE made me feel like a chimp dropped into an airliner cockpit. I had the worst time trying to figure out how to turn off the "of course you have an enterprise server dedicated to delivering upgrades!" setting. None of it seemed to, uh, scale down for our piddly purposes.

[rhplus]

.NET Core is a ground-up rewrite of the frameworks and tools. It's completely decoupled from Visual Studio. This would get you started on a toy project (one source file, one project file) now:

    dotnet new console --output sample1
    dotnet publish --self-contained -r linux-x64 sample1

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/get-started