Assembling, Linking, and Debugging In addition to assembling and linking, you can use the asm32.bat file to launch your program in the Visual Studio debugger. Try the following command: asm32 /D main If the program assembles and links with no errors, your program should load in Visual Studio. The first time you do this with a new program, the source code will not appear. All you have to do is press the F10 key to begin debugging, and your program should appear with a yellow band across the first executable line: (Depending on how Visual Studio is configured, you might have to press F8 to do the same thing.) From here, you can step through the program. When you get to the call to WriteString, you can even trace into its code by pressing the F11 key (trace to). When you finish, close Visual Studio. From this time on, when you load the same program in the Visual Studio debugger, your source code will appear right away. Assembling without Linking Occasionally, you may want to assemble programs but not link them. This happens, for example, when you are creating a multimodule project and you want to assemble each asm file into an obj file separately before linking them into the final exe program. Or, you might be assembling a module to be inserted into a link library (like Irvine32.lib). To assemble a source file only, inser the /C option before the name of the file being assembled: asm32 /C main You should see the following output: Assembling: main.asm The file main.obj was produced. .................................. If you are interested in learning more about how batch file commands work, here are some reference links we found: Allenware.com: Microsoft TechNet article: , by Brien Posey Microsoft TechNet article: , by Troy Thompson
Assembling, Linking, and Debugging In addition to assembling and linking, you can use the asm32.bat file to launch your program in the Visual Studio debugger. Try the following command: asm32 /D main If the program assembles and links with no errors, your program should load in Visual Studio. The first time you do this with a new program, the source code will not appear. All you have to do is press the F10 key to begin debugging, and your program should appear with a yellow band across the first executable line: (Depending on how Visual Studio is configured, you might have to press F8 to do the same thing.) From here, you can step through the program. When you get to the call to WriteString, you can even trace into its code by pressing the F11 key (trace to). When you finish, close Visual Studio. From this time on, when you load the same program in the Visual Studio debugger, your source code will appear right away. Assembling without Linking Occasionally, you may want to assemble programs but not link them. This happens, for example, when you are creating a multimodule project and you want to assemble each asm file into an obj file separately before linking them into the final exe program. Or, you might be assembling a module to be inserted into a link library (like Irvine32.lib). To assemble a source file only, inser the /C option before the name of the file being assembled: asm32 /C main You should see the following output: Assembling: main.asm The file main.obj was produced. .................................. If you are interested in learning more about how batch file commands work, here are some reference links we found: Allenware.com: Microsoft TechNet article: , by Brien Posey Microsoft TechNet article: , by Troy Thompson