What is the Best Practice for Combating the Console Closing Issue?

Question

After compiling console programs the console window closes immediately after running. What is the best practice for keeping it open? I\'ve searched google loads, I\'m used t

Answer 1

Resist the temptation to do anything. Well behaved command line programs exit when they've finished running reporting a status via their exit code. This enables them to be scriptable and 'good citizens' in automated environments. Even in an interactive environment, why force the user to make an extra key press just because of your debugging environment?

If you run, rather than debug then Visual Studio will open a console windows that pauses after your application exits so that you can still view the output. I don't know why the behaviour is different when you debug, perhaps because you have breakpoints available so if you want to see the output at various stages you can place breakpoints after the relevant output statements, or at the end of main or enable various 'stop on exception throw' options.

Whatever the reason, I've never felt compelled to compromise the behaviour of my application just to enhance my debugging experience.