This is different and somewhat confusing to me. The Command Line Tools are just broken out from a large IDE that isn't necessary to run the results. In this "M

This is different and somewhat confusing to me. The Command Line Tools are just broken out from a large IDE that isn't necessary to run the results. In this "Microsoft Build Tools" case, they're separating the tools from their runtime support (the .NET framework). You need the framework to run whatever you're building, so it doesn't seem like much is gained by splitting them up.