Although Visual Fortran comes with an integrated Windows-based development environment called Microsoft visual development environment, you can still use many software tools directly from the command line.
If you prefer to use a text-based environment, you can build your programs or libraries in the console (such as the Fortran Command Prompt in the Compaq Visual Fortran program folder), a command-line operating environment similar to MS-DOS provided by your Windows operating system. However, to get the benefit of components that you cannot use from the command line, you may want to do some of your work from the console, and some of it in the visual development environment.
When you run an application for Windows (such as the Format Statement Editor) from the command line, Windows recognizes that the program does not execute within the command window and acts accordingly.
You can tell Windows to run a program with its own resources by using the START command. For example, to run the Library Manager as a separate task, the command is:
START LIB.EXE
Visual Fortran contains an extensive electronic reference you view with the HTML Help Viewer. This includes the Visual Fortran online documentation and a search engine.
To access HTML Help Viewer books from outside the visual development environment, click on the Online Documentation item in the Visual Fortran program folder. If you want to use Visual Fortran from the command line, you can still use the visual development environment to display HTML Help Viewer, and task switch between it and the console.
The following related sections discuss command-line tools:
For a summary of all Visual Fortran tools, see Overview of Visual Fortran Tools.