Win32 System Services: The Heart of Windows® 98 and Windows® 2000

14.1. The Possibilities

The MS-DOS prompt window is built around a console, and in that form it is immediately recognizable. The console API provides a two-dimensional array of characters that scroll upward when the cursor hits the bottom of the window. The four most common ways to use a console are as follows:

1. If you want to create your own custom command interpreter to replace the MS-DOS prompt, you should use the console library.

2. If you want to add console input or output to a normal GUI or MFC program, you do that using consoles. For example, while debugging an MFC program, you might want to stream a set of coordinates out to a console as you are painting lines on a screen so that you can check the coordinates.

3. If you want to port a full-screen ...