You know, for some stuff I just 'dumb' my way through it. Not everything, mind you, but for some stuff. Take COM, for example. I knew from the start it would be hard, very hard. So hard in fact, that I may fail to grasp it. So that is something I didn't dumb my way through. I worked hard on it, read every book, and devoured all the documentation.
But compiling from the command line with Visual Studio is something I just dumbed my way through. Never studied up on it much. There's actually like seven selections on Visual Studio 2019's Start Menu for a command line session. Only two of them made any sense to me. Those two specifically mentioned building x86 code or x64 code. One of the other selections, and actually the top one, which I believe you chose Patrice, says something to the effect "Developer Command Prompt For Visual Studio". Now, in my mind I have to admit, that does sound good. But what goes through my mind when I read it, is "a black command line window is going to come up staring me in the face, with an intimidating cursor sitting there blinking at me in an impatient fashion, and somehow or other I'm going to have to tell it whether to build x86 code or x64 code, and somewhere in gigabytes of Microsoft documentation there are listings of command line switches describing how to specify that, and since I'm dumbing my way through it, I don't have a clue what they are, and I'm too lazy to look for them, so I don't think I want to choose that - at least not while there are two obvious selections there that specifically specify building x86 or x64 code !
And as for those other funny choices about x86_ARMx64 cross tools and ARMx64_x86 cross tools - I don't have a CLUE what that means!
Well, I do now! In about 30 seconds of searching I came up with this link that describes it all!

....
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/building-on-the-command-line?view=msvc-160Been wondering for years what all that 'cross tools' stuff was about - probably since I first saw it with Visual Studio 2008! I took the 16 minutes it says it takes to read it and now I'm not dumbing my way through it anymore! I'm quite the expert on it now, bathing in the brilliant light of truth and knowledge, if I do say so myself!

All I really need to do now is follow James lead and learn to use batch files a bit better and there will be no stopping me!

Here's the TRUTH scribbed on the golden tablets...
Command File Host and Target architectures
=======================================================================
vcvars32.bat Use the 32-bit x86-native tools to build 32-bit x86 code.
vcvars64.bat Use the 64-bit x64-native tools to build 64-bit x64 code.
vcvarsx86_amd64.bat Use the 32-bit x86-native cross tools to build 64-bit x64 code.
vcvarsamd64_x86.bat Use the 64-bit x64-native cross tools to build 32-bit x86 code.
vcvarsx86_arm.bat Use the 32-bit x86-native cross tools to build ARM code.
vcvarsamd64_arm.bat Use the 64-bit x64-native cross tools to build ARM code.
vcvarsx86_arm64.bat Use the 32-bit x86-native cross tools to build ARM64 code.
vcvarsamd64_arm64.bat Use the 64-bit x64-native cross tools to build ARM64 code.
vcvarsall.bat Use parameters to specify the host and target architectures, Windows SDK, and platform choices. For a list of supported options, call by using a /help parameter.
I spent some time this evening while watching CNN tracking down the locations of some of these vcvarsXXXXXXX.bat files that the shortcuts on the Start Menu point to, and I put together this little file with the name of the batch file, and it's actual contents if you open the thing. Fact is, these are all really little files comprising only a few bytes. Here are the names of the file and their contents....
vcvars32.bat contents >>>> @call "%~dp0vcvarsall.bat" x86 %*
vcvars64.bat contents >>>> @call "%~dp0vcvarsall.bat" x64 %*
vcvarsamd64_x86.bat contents >>>> @call "%~dp0vcvarsall.bat" x64_x86 %*
vcvarsx86_amd64.bat contents >>>> @call "%~dp0vcvarsall.bat" x86_x64 %*
As you can see, they all call vcvarsall.bat passing in various parameters. I can only barely follow it. I bet James understands it all perfectly. That's the stuff I need to study up on. If you want to see some really nasty looking stuff, check out vcvarsall.bat.