Adding Console I/O to a Win32 GUI App

One of the common misconceptions surrounding Win32 programming is that you must decide early in the design process whether your application will be a console or GUI application. In reality, console applications can create windows and have a message loop just like a GUI application (see "Adding Graphics to Console Applications" by Michael Covington, Visual Developer, June/July 1997). Alternatively, graphical applications can create and use a console. Although Win32 provides functions for communicating with a console, they are a little clumsy to use and require parameters that are unnecessary for simple text I/O. This article shows how to use standard C/C++ I/O with consoles, and how to work around specific problems in the Visual C++ I/O library.

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