Visual DialogScript has an interactive development environment (IDE) which makes it easy to develop and debug your Windows scripts. 

For a description of each feature of the IDE interface, click on a button or menu or area on the picture below.

The debugger has dockable toolbars and tear-off editor and information window panes. The editor has support for mouse-wheel scrolling and drag-and-drop editing.

The VDS development is project-based. The main file that you open is the project (.DSP) file, which contains important settings for the project. The project manager allow you to change some of these settings.

The script file (.DSC) of the same name as the project is the main (and in many cases only) file of the project. However, in VDS 5 a program can contain code from multiple .DSC files (by means of the #INCLUDE command). To permit the development of multi-file projects the IDE supports multiple editor panes.

When creating a new file, the IDE can use a predefined template. Just create a file in the format required and save it as 'default.dsc' in the same folder as VDS.EXE. When a script file is saved, the previous version is renamed with a .~dsc extension, similar to before. However, the previous .~dsc file is deleted to the Recycle Bin. Therefore you can use your Recycle Bin to restore any previous version of a script even after several modifications have been saved.

Scripts are edited in the script area, which is an advanced multi tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting.  Scripts can be run from the main window, using either the menu options or the toolbar buttons.

Visual DialogScript provides several aids to debugging.  You can set breakpoints at any point in the script throught the script window, and then check the value of each variable using the debug window.   You can also use single-step mode to step through the script a line at a time.

The Options menu lets you set your preferences for various options in the development environment.

The Tools menu provides access to tools which you may find helpful when creating your script program.  You can add your own tools to the menu.  Check our Web site for add-in tools you can download.