How do I debug existing C programs with Visual Studio 2010 Professional?

Question

how can I use the Visual Studio Debugger on existing C programs I found in a textbook? I want to debug these little examples one by one, but without the overhead of creating a full project for each example.

Example: Let's say I compile "helloworld.c" from the Visual Studio command prompt ("cl.exe helloworld.c"). This gives me helloworld.obj and helloworld.exe. I would like to know if there is a way to use the VS debugger on "helloworld.exe". So far, I have only worked with the debugger on full-blown projects; I have no idea how to debug small "stand-alone" test programs without the Visual Studio project overhead. (I hope this is not a dumb question, as the VS Debugger might only be available for the full project.)

Thank you for any ideas.

Answer 1

Why don't you create one project for testing the sample codes? You can create a single .c-file for all the samples. This would look something like

void sampleA()
{
 //hello world
}

void sampleB()
{
 //hello everybody else
}

void main(int argc, char** argv)
{
//  sampleA(); 
  sampleB();
}

Answer 2

What I do when I have to use VS is to reuse the plain.c project I created a long time ago.

Just paste new code there and go. Throw the code in another file if you want to keep it.