In my day-to-day job we needed a way to parse command line arguments in an easy and structured way.
So after some research I found the awesome NuGet-Package Command Line Parser Library. This package allows to define your options with Property-Attributes.
Example of a CommandLineOptions class
In this example class we define all options we want to parse as properties and create a static collection of Examples that will be displayed in the tools command line help.
public class CommandLineOptions { /// <summary> /// e.g. yourapp.exe -d|--database "DatabaseName" /// </summary> [Option( shortName: 'd', longName: "database", Required = true, HelpText = "Name of the database to be used")] public string DatabaseName { get; set; } /// <summary> /// e.g. yourapp.exe -l|--language "DE" /// </summary> [Option( shortName: 'l', longName: "language", Required = false, HelpText = "Country short key (EN|DE|IT|ES) for the report language")] public string ReportLanguage { get; set; } [Usage(ApplicationAlias = "yourapp.exe")] public static IEnumerable<Example> Examples => new List<Example>() { new Example ( "Use default settings", new CommandLineOptions() { DatabaseName = "DatabaseName", } ), new Example ( "Use custom report language", new CommandLineOptions() { DatabaseName = "DatabaseName", ReportLanguage = "DE" } ) }; } Parse CommandLineOptions class
When your tool is executed you can than parse the passed arguments into the CommandLineOptions class as follows.
static void Main(string[] args) { CommandLine.Parser.Default.ParseArguments<CommandLineOptions>(args) .WithParsed(ExecuteWithOptions) .WithNotParsed(HandleParseError); } static void ExecuteWithOptions(CommandLineOptions options) { // Handle options } static void HandleParseError(IEnumerable<Error> errors) { // Handle errors } 
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