How can we prevent console windows from being displayed under Visual Studio?

Question

Is it possible (and how) to disable the display of the Console window when we launch an application under Visual Studio?

EDIT:

Some precisions:

I have at the beginning of this project no GUI system. In a second time I have added QT gui to this project. Currently when I launch my application, I have the console system and the QT's MainWindow

I would like to disable console system

There are a lot of different ways to answer this question... Which one is correct depends on what exactly you're trying to accomplish. Can you please edit your question to give us more details? — Cody Gray - on strike, May 19 '11 at 07:25
Ah, then simple enough. You need to convert your application into a standard Windows application, rather than a Console application. [Als's answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6055026/how-can-we-prevent-console-windows-from-being-displayed-under-visual-studio/6055094#6055094) has you covered. — Cody Gray - on strike, May 19 '11 at 07:53

Alok Save · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-19T07:58:57.997

6

You will have to use just an application and not a console application. To do that:

Change SubSystem to Windows. You can find it under:

Properties ---> Linker ---> System

and replace

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])

with

int APIENTRY _tWinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)

edited May 19 '11 at 07:58

answered May 19 '11 at 07:16

Alok Save

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I am under VS2010 I can't manage to find SubSystem/Windows option – Guillaume Paris May 19 '11 at 07:56
For future googlers: You don't have to change the subsystem. If no subsystem is selected (default for console project), just replacing `_tmain` with `_tWinMain` is enough. – Navin Mar 22 '13 at 20:38
VS2013: Project > Properties > Linker > System then set SubSystem to Windows – dynamiclynk Jun 27 '14 at 16:36

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 09:59

You cannot (but see below) and this has nothing to do with Visual Studio, but with how Windows differentiates Console and "non Console" applications.

A console application has some kind of flag set in it's executable so that Windows knows that it's a CLI and Windows will then always open up a console and attach it to this process.

A GUI app doesn't have this flag and therefore Windows will not attach a console (and when run from the Windows cmd.exe shell, the shell won't attach to this app either.)

You can control Console attaching and detaching from your app with the AllocConsole and FreeConsole Windows API functions, but what you really want to do is probably what Als describes in his answer.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 19 '11 at 07:16

0

If it is a windows application then yes - you control the UI. If it is a console application then you get a console with stdin, stdout, etc. If you are looking for something with no UI at all then maybe a Windows Service is what you are after.

answered May 19 '11 at 07:16

John Pickup

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Or simply a standard Windows application that doesn't specify `WS_VISIBLE`. No reason to create a Windows Service just to get an app without a UI. – Cody Gray - on strike May 19 '11 at 07:27

How can we prevent console windows from being displayed under Visual Studio?

3 Answers3