Visual C++ Quick Start and IDE Reference

The purpose of this document is to help someone who is encountering Visual C++ for the first time to get started quickly with writing C++ programs using the programming environment provided by the latest Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Suggestions for additional material to be included on this page are always welcome.

Overview

Visual Studio allows you to write many different kinds of C++ software, from simple console programs to DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries) to Active Template Library Components to the usual kinds of Windows GUI applications that we use all the time. There is no need to worry if you don't know what some of these things are, since you will (probably) be writing console programs for the foreseeable future. A console program is one that has a simple (old-fashioned, if you like) text-based interface, in which program output appears on lines that scroll upward to the top of, and eventually off, the screen. We use such programs so that we can concentrate on data structures, algorithms, and C++ itself, without being distracted by the time and energy it takes to deal with a graphical user interface, which adds little if anything to our main interests in this course.

Whenever you do something in the Visual Studio version of C++ (Visual C++), you will generally do it within the framework of a single project within your solution, though a solution may actually contain several projects if that is appropriate. Whatever projects you've been working on are noted by Visual Studio, and you are presented with a list of the most recent ones via the Recent Projects pane on the Start Page whenever you fire up Visual Studio. [However, although this will be the case for Visual Studio on your home computer, it may not happen if you are using Visual Studio in a strictly controlled networked environment where some settings (such as this one) may be set back to their initial default values according to some schedule set by the network administrators.]

Visual Studio does its best to help you out when you're working. Sometimes this can be pleasant and useful. Other times it can be downright unpleasant and frustrating. It can also be quite overwhelming, when you find, for example, that quite a number of files you know nothing about have been created for you. Ignoring these extra files is usually the best thing to do.

So, it is important to have a good sense of the big picture, and not to be overwhelmed or intimidated by all the minutiae that need not concern you, at least not in the short term.

Getting Started: Creating, Building, and Running a New "Win32 Console Application"

Here, in very brief form, is the sequence of steps necessary to start a new project, enter a single source code file, and then build and run the executable:

  1. Start Visual Studio from the appropriate place in your Windows environment. After a (short, you hope) wait, among the things you will see on your screen will be a "Start Page" window in the center of your screen containing several smaller panes, which may vary, depending on how Visual Studio actually opens.
  2. You should be able to choose New Project ... under Start, or choose File | New | Project under the File menu.
  3. In the "New Project" window that opens up, make sure you choose the Visual C++ | Win32 | Win32 Console Application option. Then enter the name of your project in the "Name:" box ("Test", for example). The "Location:" box may contain the path you want, and if so you can just leave it. Otherwise, you will need to enter the full path to the location where you want your project to be stored. (You may also want to make a note of this location, so that you can look there later to see what files have been created.) Next, be sure to uncheck the "Create directory for solution" box if it is checked. [The reason for this is that you are only creating a single project, not a "solution" to contain several projects.] Now you may click OK.
  4. A "Win32 Application Wizard" window opens up. Click on "Application Settings", and make sure the "Empty project" box is checked. Then click the "Finish" button. (Now is a good time to go to Windows Explorer and check to see what files have shown up in the location identified in the "Location:" box in the above step.)
  5. At this point your "Solution Explorer" window will contain, among other things, an icon labeled by the name of your project. If so, your project has been set up but doesn't contain any source code yet.
  6. Under the "Project" menu choose "Add new item..." (or press Ctrl+Shift+A). In the "Add New Item" window that opens up, choose Visual C++ | Code | C++ file (.cpp). On the other hand, if you already have a program file that you wish to add to your project, rather than write a new one, you should choose "Add Existing Item..." at the beginning of this step.
  7. Now, in the "Name:" box enter a name for your file. If this is to be the file which contains the main function for your project, you may want to give it the same name as the project, but this is by no means necessary. You do not need to add .cpp to the name, since Visual Studio knows this is a C++ file and will add it for you.
  8. Now click the "Add" button and an editing window will open, into which you may enter the source code for your program. If this is your first time through, try the code for a simple "Hello, world!" program.
  9. When you are ready to try a build, go to the "Build" menu and choose "Build Solution" (or press Ctrl+Shift+B, or click on the "Build icon" of the "Build toolbar" if that toolbar is displayed). Your source code file is automatically saved to disk before the build. The "Output Window" will open and display the results of your build, including any compile-time or other errors that have shown up in the attempt to build your solution. Note that if you have made an error and have to make source code changes, the changes you made are again automatically saved to disk when you choose to rebuild. You can double click on any error line to show where that error has occurred in your source code, or press F1 when the line is highlighted in the "Output Window" to get more information from the Help system on the error reported in that line.
  10. If the build is successful, an executable file with the same name as the project and a .exe extension will have been created in the Debug subdirectory. Next, go to the Debug menu and choose "Start without debugging" (or press Ctrl+F5) to run your program. (Actually, you can go here directly before the build step, and the build step will be done before the run.) A console window should open and your program should run in it. The IDE supplies its own pause at the end of your program, but it is usually a good idea to place a pause of your own at the end of each of your programs. If you don't, and you run that executable by double clicking on it in Windows, you may not see all of the output from your program, since the console window that Windows Explorer opens will disappear the moment your program ends.
  11. Once you have finished to this point, you may remove the first file from your project and add a new one, you may close down the current project and create another project, or you may shut down Visual Studio itself.

Running your program outside Visual Studio

Once you have a working executable, you can run the program independently of Visual C++ in the following two ways:

Working with Files in a Project

Once you have added to your project all the files the project needs, you may perform any of the following actions.
  1. Double click on the name of a source code file in the "Solution Explorer" window to display it in the text editor window.
  2. Place the cursor in the word "include" (of any #include line), right click, and then choose "Open Document" to view that particular header file in the text editor window. Notice how a "name tab" appears for each "window" that opens up in the text editor, above the text of the currently active window. Just clicking on any such tab will make the corresponding window active.
  3. Press Ctrl+F5 at any time to run the current executable. If it has not yet been built, or if changes have been made in the source code, you will be prompted to (re)build before running. Note again that files are saved to disk as part of the build process.
  4. Choose "Rebuild Solution" from the Build menu at any time if you wish to re-build everything for any reason (whether it has changed or not).
  5. Press Ctrl+F7 if you just want to compile the source code file in the active window, but not build an executable.
  6. A potentially confusing situation occurs if your program itself reads from a data file: In this case, the IDE expects that file to be in your project directory, even though the executable is in a subdirectory called Debug in your project directory. Such a data file does not have to be added to the project, so long as it is present and in the right location. On the other hand, if you are running your program from Windows Explorer, or from the command prompt in a console window, your program and the data file from which it reads must be in the same directory, unless you supply to your program the full path to a file in some other location.
  7. To remove a file from the current project, click on the file in the "Solution Explorer" window and press the Delete key. In the window that opens up be sure to choose the "Remove" option to delete that file from the current project (though not from its physical location on disk). If you really do want to delete the file entirely in addition to removing it from the project, choose the "Delete" option.

The Text Editor: Creating and Modifying Source Code Files

The first thing to know about the Visual Studio text editor is that many of the "usual" commands for navigation and applying changes to text that are familiar to users of other Microsoft products (such as Word) also work here, and (mercifully) in the same way. Hence, assuming this familiarity, we shall not give the details of those commands here. It is therefore assumed that you are familiar with what the following keyboard commands do for you when editing text: the four arrow keys, Home, End, Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End, PageUp, PageDown (and using the Shift key with any of these motion commands to select text), as well as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, and Ins.

We list below some commands and features that are either not present in other applications, or are not as widely known or used, but which you may find useful in the Visual Studio Visual C++ environment:

  1. Let the editor's "smart autoindent" feature work for you. It knows, for the most part, how your code should be formatted, and you should let it decide, for example, things like what the indent level should be (4 spaces), and the proper placement of braces. This feature should be on by default. In fact, you can select a section of code that has had its formatting "messed up", or is not formatted quite right, and have the whole thing properly formatted for you automatically by pressing Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+F.
  2. If a group of contiguous lines of code need to be indented or unindented one or more levels, select those lines of code and then press the TAB key to indent them an additional level, or the Shift+TAB combination to "unindent" them one level.
  3. It is a good idea to have no TAB characters in your file. You can remove all TAB characters from a file at any time by selecting your entire file with Ctrl+A and then choosing Edit | Advanced | Untabify Selection. Ideally, your default setting should be to have spaces inserted into your file when you press the TAB key.
  4. Ctrl+R, then Ctrl+W toggles the display of whitespace in your source code. Blank spaces show up as a dot, while each Tab character shows up as a small rightward-pointing arrow (->). This is a great help when you want to check whether in fact you have removed all the tabs from your source code, or any other document.
  5. To set Visual Studio itself to handle Tab characters in the appropriate way, go to Tools | Options | Text Editor | C/C++ | Tabs and set "Indenting" to "Smart", both "Tab size:" and "Indent size:" to 4, and activate "Insert spaces" rather than "Keep tabs". With these settings you should never have to "untabify" your code again, since spaces will automatically be inserted whenever you press the TAB key, and your indentation levels will always be 4. These settings must of course be compatible with whatever programming style conventions you are using.
  6. Double-clicking on the little rectangular box above the up-arrow at the top of the scroll-box region at the right of the text editor window will split the current window into two equal parts, one above the other, as will choosing "Split" from the "Window" menu. This gives you two views of the same file, which can be scrolled and edited independently. Double-clicking on the separating bar will return you to a single window, as will choosing "Remove Split" from the "Window" menu.
  7. Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+K toggles an unnamed bookmark at the cursor line, and Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+N moves to the next bookmark, while Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+P moves to the previous bookmark. Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+L clears all bookmarks in the current window.
  8. Ctrl+G allows you to go to various locations, including (probably most usefully) a particular line number.
  9. When the cursor is on either side of a bracket (round, square, curly, or angle), Ctrl+] will place the cursor on the matching bracket symbol.
  10. Ctrl+U/Ctrl+Shift+U converts selected text to lower/upper case.
  11. To change the font size, choose "Tools | Options | Environment | Fonts and Colors", and then choose your desired size in the "Size:" box.
  12. You can toggle a source file window between its regular size and a full screen with either the menu command View | Full Screen, or Shift+Alt+Enter. Even in full screen mode, a menu bar is retained at the top of the window.
  13. Ctrl+Z undoes the previous change. Pressing it again undoes the change before that, and so on. If you undo one change to many, you can "re-do" the last undo with a Ctrl+Y.
  14. Clicking in the blank area to the left of the a line in the edit window selects that line.
  15. Tab/Shift+Tab indent/unindent selected text one level of indentation.
  16. Ctrl+Tab cycles through the queue of open windows, much like Alt+Tab does in Windows itself.
  17. Ctrl+F opens a Find dialog box for entry of a search string, after which F3/Shift+F3 find the next/previous instances. Esc gets you out of Find and back to the source code window.
  18. Ctrl+F3 will start a search for selected text.
  19. Ctrl+H starts a Find/Replace.
  20. Ctrl+I starts and "incremental search", i.e., a search that starts as soon as you begin typing and looks for the first instance of as much as you have typed in so far, and Ctrl+Shift+I starts a similar backwards search.
  21. Ctrl+Shift+T interchanges the current and following words, while Alt+Shift+T interchanges the current and following lines.
  22. Ctrl+Delete deletes from the cursor up to but not including the first character of the next word to the right. Ctrl+Backspace deletes from the cursor back to, and including, the nearest character to the left that appears as the first character of a word.
  23. Ctrl+L deletes the current line and places it on the clipboard, Ctrl+Shift+L deletes it without placing on the clipboard (i.e., it's gone).
  24. Ctrl with the arrow keys provides some useful commands: Ctrl+RightArrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the next word, while Ctrl+LeftArrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the previous word. Ctrl+UpArrow scrolls the window down one line, while Ctrl+DownArrow scrolls the window up one line, with the insertion point remaining fixed in both cases.
  25. Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+C will "comment out" any lines you have selected, while Ctrl+K, then Ctrl+U will remove the comments from selected lines commented out with C++ style comments.
  26. Visual Studio has a number of other useful features that we will not describe in detail here. We do mention them, however, since you should at least know about them, and do your best to explore their possibilities, as needed, in the course of your program development:

Debugging

As your programs get more complex, you may from time to time want (or need) to use the Visual C++ debugger to help you track down a run-time error or see where your program is going astray as it executes. When you start debugging, a number of windows will open automatically. It may be useful to explore the various options that are available to you for viewing, and for other actions, via these windows. Here is a brief list of some debugger commands:

  1. Choose your break points, which can be toggled on and off, either by pressing F9, or by clicking in the grey vertical bar to the left of the code, when the cursor is on the code line at which you wish to break during a run.
  2. Start debugging by choosing Debug | Start, or by simply pressing F5.
  3. Press F10 to step through your code a line at a time (without going into functions, which may be what you need most of the time), or F11 to step through your code, including the internal code of functions.
  4. To skip over some code place the cursor at the point to which you would like to go without stopping and then press Ctrl+F10 to "run to the cursor".
  5. Press Shift+F5 to stop debugging and Ctrl+Shift+F5 to restart.

Useful Miscellaneous Information

  1. An editor macro is like a C++ function (or C++ macro, for that matter) that can be called upon to perform a specific task. A number of editor macros may be available for your use, and, if so, they will be described elsewhere.
  2. If your program uses command-line parameters and you are testing it with the IDE, in the "Solution Explorer" window select your project, right click and choose "Properties". In the "Property Pages" window that opens, choose Configuration Properties | Debugging and then enter your command line arguments in the "Command Arguments:" box.
  3. If your program uses RTTI (which stands for Run-Time Type Identification, or Run-Time Type Information, depending on where you read about it), this feature may need to be "turned on". To do this, first right click on the name of your project in the "Solution Explorer" window and then choose "Properties". In the "Property Pages" window which appears, choose "C/C++" and then "Language". One of the lines in the sub-window that then appears is labeled "Run-Time Type Info", and this option must be set to Yes.
  4. When you start using C++ with Visual Studio, you may get some (or a lot) of "Warning" messages at compile time that you are not used to seeing, particularly if you are using the STL. These warnings will be numbered, and if you know that whatever the "problem" is truly will not affect your code, you can avoid such a message with a line like the following placed at the beginning of your program, just before your #include directives. If the warning is numbered 4786 (for example), put in this line:
    #pragma warning(disable:4786)
    A "pragma directive" such as this one is a compiler-specific instruction of some kind meant for the C++ pre-processor. Another reason you might want to use such a pragma is to avoid the messages from Microsoft telling you that certain perfectly standard features have been "deprecated" (by Microsoft, apparently), strcpy from the <cstring> header of the Standard Library being one of them, for example.
  5. If you wish to prepare a standalone package in the form of a .obj file that others can link to, for use with simple console programs, you should first ensure that the following settings are made:
    1. Properties | Configuration Properties | C/C++ | General | Debug Information Format = Disabled
    2. Properties | Configuration Properties | C/C++ | Code Generation | Enable Minimal Rebuild = No
  6. If you upgrade your compiler at any point, it is a good idea to rebuild your old projects with the new compiler, and to discard any of the IDE-generated files associated with those projects. Although this is generally good advice, the practice can rise up to bite you as well. For example, just blindly recompiling with Visual Studio 2005 a C++ program that worked fine when compiled with Visual Studio 2003 produces an executable that no longer works on a machine that only has Visual Studio 2003 on it. Or at least a Win32 Console Project produced by going through the same motions on 2005 that were used on 2003 produces this effect. You can get an executable that is "backward runnable", using Visual Studio 2005, by starting not with a Win32 Project, but with a General Project and in addition to the two settings mentioned above, making the following setting as well:
  7. Thanks to Dr. Mark Young for the following observation: If you are trying to make any of the settings mentioned in the previous two list items, and you are not seeing the C/C++ option under Configuration Properties on your project's Properties page, it is likely because you are trying to set the property before adding a C++ file to your project. So ... make sure you have some C++ code in your project before trying to set any of those properties.

Files Used/Created by Visual C++

If you are curious about what's in the many different kinds of files that Visual C++ produces in the course of its meanderings toward your final executable, check under "Files Created for Visual C++ Projects" in the MSDN Library.

Using Built-In and Programmer-Defined Macros

An editor macro is like a C++ function (or C++ macro, for that matter) that can be called upon to perform a specific task. Two groups of editor macros are available for your use, and you should know how to install them in Visual Studio and make them available to use during your C++ program development.

First, there should be two files available from your course web site. As of fall, 2011, these files are:

  1. ScobeyCPP.vsmacros
  2. Samples.vsmacros

Download both of these files and store them in a suitable place. If you have set up a Visual Studio C++ Test folder for your projects, Visual Studio has probably created a "macros folder" for you, and you can put these files there, but they don't have to be in that location.

In any case, you need to make your Visual Studio aware of these two file and their contents. To do this you have to open Visual Studio and then perform the following steps for each file:

  1. Go to Tools | Macros | Load Macro Project...
  2. Browse to the location where you've stored the two files, click on one of the files, and then click the Add button, which will add that particular file of macros to Visual Studio.

Once you have the macros installed, you can use any one of them by performing the following steps:

  1. Make sure the cursor in your code window is positioned at the location where you want the action of the macro to be performed.
  2. Click on one or more of the plus signs (+) until you come to the macro that you want to use.
  3. Right click on the name of the macro and choose Run from the pop-up menu.

You can also write your own macros, and if there is time this is a topic that may be discussed in the lab.

Compiling, Linking and Running C++ Programs from the Command Line

Sometimes, in addition to working in the Visual Studio IDE, it is convenient to do a quick compile, link and run of your program at the command line. Among other things, this avoids creation of many of the files that the IDE creates whenever you use it to build a project. Thus, testing a program this way cuts down on the amount of real estate consumed, if that is a consideration.

One thing to keep in mind if you are doing this is that you should ensure that you open a Visual Studio command window, since this will make certain things available that might be necessary and that might not be available if you open just a "garden variety" command window. You can do this as one of the Visual Studio options in your Start menu, and you may also be able to open such a command window by right clicking on the directory where you would like the command window to open.

To compile and link a simple program, say hello.cpp, use the following command:

> cl -EHsc hello.cpp

This will produce the files hello.obj and hello.exe. In other words, it will both compile the source code and link the resulting object file to produce the final executable. Think of the -EHsc compiler switch as a way to avoid complaints that the cl command will have if you don't use it (try compiling without it just to see).

You may also use the cl command to just compile by supplying it with the -c switch, after which you may use the link command to explicitly link the resulting .obj file (along with, perhaps, other .obj files).

It may also be possible to set up the "system include path" and the "system library path" so that the cl and/or link commands know where to find source files to be included and/or .obj files to be linked, without explicitly indicating the corresponding paths in your code or on the command line.

One thing to keep in mind when working at the command line is this: you should do all of your compiles at the command line. That is (for example), if you have compiled a source code file within the Visual Studio IDE, you should not necessarily expect the resulting .obj file to link properly with another .obj file that you have obtained by compiling at the command line.

Working Directories and #include Files

A recommended "best practice" is to create a single Test project, and then simply move files into and out of the project as you continue to work on various submissions and other programs. This works well as long as your current project contains only one file, or a small number of files. Even if this is true, over time your project folder will start to fill up with source code files that really have no connection with one another and your project directory will start to get very cluttered.

So ... it makes sense to group the files that belong together and place them in a subdirectory where they can be kept separate from the files in the main Test project folder and also separate from the files in other similar subdirectories.

But ... and this is the key concept here ... it would be even better if we could put the files belonging together in a separate subdirectory and still continue working on them as the current project with the Visual Studio IDE, but without moving them back into the project folder itself. Fortunately, we can. We just have to make sure we tell Visual Studio where to find the things that it needs.

Let's suppose you have a subdirectory called other in your Test project directory. If the files you want the ID to work on are in this directory, the first thing you should do is make this your working directory. Here's how you do this:

  1. Right click on your project name (Test, say) in the Solution Explorer pane.
  2. Choose the Properties option at the bottom of the pop-up list.
  3. In the Test Property Pages window that opens, choose Configuration Properties | Debugging in the left pane and then click on the Working Directory line in the right pane.
  4. Browse to the other directory, then click on it and make sure the full path to this directory shows up as the Working Directory.

Doing this tells Visual Studio to look for whatever files in needs in this directory, rather than in the main project directory. For example, if it needs to include a file like utilities.h, it will look for it there. Or, if you are working on a C++ file that wants to open and read from a textfile, it will look, by default, for that file in the current working directory as well.

Note, however that a potential difficulty arises here. The utilities.h file is not in the other subdirectory; it's in the main project directory Test. We can fix this problem in at least three ways:

  1. First, we can copy (or move) the utilities.h file into whatever subdirectory is our current Working Directory. It should be clear that this option is one to be avoided.
  2. Second, we can simply add the utilities.h file to our project. In the beginning, we did not add this file to our project, since it wasn't necessary as long as it was in our main project folder Test, which (by default) was also the current Working Directory.
  3. Third, we can explicitly add our Test project folder as one of the places where Visual Studio looks for #include files, even if its current working directory is somewhere else. Here's how we do this:
    1. Click on the Tools menu and choose Options... at the bottom of the pop-up list.
    2. In the Options window that opens up, choose Projects and Solutions in the left pane, and then click on VC++ Directories.
    3. In the "Show directories for:" box at the upper right, choose "Include files" from the drop-down list.
    4. Now press Ctrl+Insert to open up a new line in the list of include directories.
    5. Now browse to, and then click on, your main project directory folder (Test, or whatever) and make sure the full path to that directory shows up in the new line you've created.
    6. Finally, click OK to close the window.