The most common types of applications you can design and build are:

• GUI applications
• Console applications
• Service applications
• Packages and DLLs

GUI applications generally have an easy-to-use interface. Console applications run from a console window. Service applications are run as Windows services. These types of applications compile as executables with start-up code. 

You can create other types of projects such as packages and DLLs that result in creating packages or dynamically linkable libraries. These applications produce executable code without start-up code. Refer to Creating packages and DLLs.