Today was my first time using Visual Studio (2008). To make things better, that was also the first time I tried my hand at C++ in the past 6 years. I’ll be writing production code – no fooling around  :)

Right. I first tried a General Project. That looked weird. Next I tried a Win32 console application. Ah, I like that better – there’s a little bit of bootstrap code in there.

By default, my project has a file called HelloWorld.cpp with a _tmain method. Let’s add some console output and press the green arrow button.

OK, I have a really pretty console window popping in and out of light so fast I can’t see the output of my program. Let’s add a greedy loop and print lots of greetings.

The actual .exe was generated in /[PROJECT]/Debug/ How about running that from the command line instead?

That’s Oh So Much Better. Now the program exits but I we can still see the output on the screen.