when to use Command Windows - visual-studio-2010

I use Immediate windows in Visual studio a lot but I am not sure what are the uses cases for using Command windows. Can it be used for debugging anyting particular? Wondering any other people use it and if so, what exactly they find it useful for?

It is useful for typing in commands to the IDE. You can use it to invoke any command, even ones that are not available on a menu or toolbar.

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autoexp.dat equivalent in emacs

Does anybody know if an equivalent of "auto expansion" mechanism (works with Visual Studio ) exist for emacs (used in debug mode with gdb).
In Visual Studio i can really hover over any class instance / structure and it shows me desired structure field (which i had specify through autoexp.dat).
Right now i am using .gdbinit but every time i have to type the aliases in (gdb) prompt to get the value of an struct instance. I am wondering any plugin/extension exist which can do autoexp.dat kind of work for me.
http://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2007/04/06/tweaking-autoexpdat-for-custom-types-in-vs2005
there are a number of ways to do this in Emacs. two popular ones are CEDET, which is powerful but heavyweight and can be brittle, and auto-complete combined with yasnippet, e.g. as described here, which was a bit slow for me but worked. All three can be installed with emacs 24's package facility.

How to make this kind of text UI?


			
				
Use a text UI library. The Curses library used to be a popular option, but it is limited by copyrights.
Fortunately, there is an uncopyrighted version available.
This is called the "Console" mode.
Depending on your development environment and language of choice, it can be as simple as Ctrl+Shift+N, "Console Project" (in Visual Studio), or tweaking compiler flags (for C++). Every IDE/language provide a way to do this.
In Windows, the Console operates in two ways. Firstly, any project can create, attach to, and modify any number of console windows whenever it wants. Secondly, with a special flag in the EXE, the project will start up already attached to a console.
The latter operates subtly differently from the former. If you want a "normal" console application, I strongly suggest against creating and attaching to consoles. Just use the Console mode compiler setting.
Clipper was a popular way to do this in DOS.
I guess this is an old Clipper program. I so, there is still active support and even GUI libraries. I suggest you try xharbour. It's not DOS anymore but pure windows based. There is a free version and a pay version (visual xHarbour). With this tool you can even access SQL databases and it's 100% clipper compatible.

Command-line dialog tool for Windows

I need a dialog tool similar to cdialog (or whiptail), but one that will work on Windows.
I have MinGW and compiling something from source is no problem, but both cdialog and whiptail, the only ones that I know of, contain code that is UNIX-specific, and so they will not compile on Windows.
Are there any alternatives that I can use? I'd rather not have to figure out and replace the platform-specific code myself.
There is a port of dialog for Windows.
I remember the E Text Editor using wxCocoaDialog for that purpose:
wxCocoaDialog is a multi-platform port of the CocoaDialog application for OS X, that allows the use of common GUI controls such as file selectors, text input, progress bars, yes/no confirmations and more with a command-line application. It is ideal for use in shell and Perl scripts (or Ruby, or Python, or... etc).
Have you looked at Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) rather than MinGW? Cygwin provides a very Unix/Linux like environment, to the extent that most Unix programs can be built without change. Depending on what you want to do with the results, though, Cygwin's licensing may be an issue.

searching VB6 code

I've inherited a ASP/VB6 code base (not my forte... yet) and I'm trying tease it apart to figure out the cause on an error message I'm receiving when running the app.
I've traced it back through an event that is being raised in on of my classes. Is there away in windows I can search the bulk of the code base for where it is being consumed?
Ctrl-F (and selecting Current Project) has not sufficed.
The linux geek in me is saying dump it to a insert distro box and just grep for the sucker. But there's got to be some way in the IDE to do it... right?
But there's got to be some way in the IDE to do it... right?
No. There are some plugins for the IDE, such as the MZ Tools that might help. Otherwise, just use the find tool from the Windows command line. Not nearly as comfortable as using grep, of course.
If you have any new version of VS (2003,5,8) installed, just use the "Find in Files" feature and point it at the VB6 folders.
Other than that, most "notepad" replacements (textpad, notepad+) offer a "Find in Files" as well.
Check out http://www.mztools.com/index.aspx
MZ-Tools 3.0 is a freeware add-in for Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic 5.0 and the Visual Basic For Applications editor.
It is essential for anyone still working with VB 6.0
It has an enhanced find feature as well as a calling Procedure similar to .net Find usage.
I have a large legacy code-base in VB6 which needs maintenance from time to time and I have used Microsoft Desktop Search on my local copy to help find variable and method names across the code files.
Also Grep is available for Windows.

Good resources for writing console style applications for Windows?

For certain programs nothing beats the command line. Unfortunately, I have never seen good documentation or examples on how to write console applications that go beyond "Hello World". I'm interested in making console apps like Vim or Emacs. Well not exactly like Vim or Emacs but one that takes over the entire command prompt while it is in use and then after you exit it leaves no trace behind. I know that on Unix there is the curses library but for Windows? ...
PDCurses works on Win32.
I found List of Console Functions on msdn, PDCurses, and The Console Module.
You can certainly write that kind of application with Delphi, which has reasonable commandline support. People often overlook that Delphi can build any kind of Windows executable, not just GUI apps.
I don't know off-hand if the free 'Turbo' edition of Delphi has anything cobbled into it to PREVENT you from using it to build console apps - I would have thought it would be fine for this kind of thing.
There is a small but good tutorial on using C++ for the Windows console at www.benryves.com/tutorials/?t=winconsole&c=all going as far as coding a simple painting program.
You could also try Free Pascal. It is a free ((L)GPL) Object Pascal compiler which is compatible with the Delphi-compiler. It has an console-based IDE, which proves that you can make very good console-applications with it, and which you can use as an example.
If you want to use a graphical IDE to build your console-application, you can download the Lazarus IDE.
As a bonus your application will run on Windows (32/64 bit), Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris etc...
In Windows or DOS, I used the conio library from Borland. It's very old but fine enough for a beginner like me.
As Robsoft says Delphi would be a good start. There is Turbo Delphi (Pascal based) or Turbo C++ both free editions.
web site here.
http://www.turboexplorer.com/
Check out some of the mono libs. They have a great one to parse command line arguments but can't remember the namespace.
Miguel just posted some terminal code as well.
For ncurses-like library/framework on Windows, I'll highly suggest to get your hand dirty with PDCurses.
If you trying/using C#, there's Curses-Sharp.
This is the best tool for it I've ever seen!!
1) Create any application using VB6 IDE
2) Convert it to Console Application, using THIS!

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