I've always find having to type commands in very distracting - makes it harder for me to think through things. When there's some kind of command grammar, and fe

I've always find having to type commands in very distracting - makes it harder for me to think through things. When there's some kind of command grammar, and few prompts, and you have to remember to press Return, it's like trying to count while somebody shouts random numbers in my ear. Hovering the mouse and pressing individual keys is about all I can manage :) Moving on from my own personal intellectual deficiencies, one nice thing about Visual Studio (that everybody should copy, in my view) is that running your program under the debugger is the default. So any time you see anything unusual happen, or there's a crash, you can start debugging straight away. This is also good when combined with automated tests. Get your tests to stop the debugger at the point of failure (for VC++, something like "if(IsDebuggerPresent()){__debugbreak();}" in your test macro(s) will do the trick) just before they abort or throw or whatever. Then when you have a failing test, you have all the information you'd have normally - and the option of some post-mortem examination. Sometimes, you won't need it, but sometimes, you will. The latter situations are always a bit more stressful and I think it makes sense to optimise for that.