Use Console2 for Visual Studio debugging?

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 开发者_C百科under VS, I want it to use Console2 instead of cmd.exe.

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.

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.