Use Console2 for Visual Studio debugging?

Question

Is there a way to use the popular Console2 cmd.exe replacement for Visual Studio debugging? In other words, when I debug a console app under VS, I want it to use Console2 in

Answer 1

Scott Hanselman blogged about this.

He suggests using this value for Console Settings > tabs > Main > Shell :

%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86

Sadly for me, This does not appear to work for Visual Studio Express 2010, which lacks a vcvarsall.bat file.

Answer 2

Interesting question. I looked into it, there are some options but none are pretty.

Console.exe takes arguments, so it's possible to start it with a specific tab and execute an arbitrary process. However, this process will always be run within it's own cmd.exe; for example if your program is c:\my.exe and you launch Console as console.exe -t tabname -r c:\myexe Console2 internally calls CreateProcess( ... cmd.exe c:\my.exe ... ), as a result you can't even see the output of my.exe. This is easily solved though: launch it as console.exe -t tabname -r "/k c:\myexe": the /k switch makes the cmd.exe stay active and you can see your program's standard output. (I looked through the source but couldn't find a way to 'attach' a tab to a currently running Console instance, so launching with arguments will always create a new instance, not sure this is what you are looking for?

You can easily modify the project's debugging properties to reflect the above:

Command: /path/to/console.exe
Command Arguments: -t tabname -r "/k $(TargetPath)"

When starting your exe from within VS, it will launch your exe witin a Console session. However the debugging won't work as VS will try to debug console.exe, not my.exe since that is now a different process. Putting a DebugBreak(); as first line in your exe's main() will sort of solve this, as it will present you the option to debug your exe. All in all, this may a bit too much of a hassle to achieve what you want, but i don't think there's another way: Console always spawns a new process, so the only way to get it debugged is to attach the debugger to it after that process started.