In VB simply execute a "Shell <var>" to send something to a DOS screen. Unless your trying to send the text to a specific DOS window you already have instantiated. There really is no "console" in Windows. -----Original Message----- From: jeffslists It sure would be nice if windows adhered more to standards, like giving the programmer access to stdout at all times. I would like to send text to stdout or a console output so I can watch processing of my speech commands in real-time. I could send the output to a file, but then I have to keep reloading in order to watch the output. Right now I have a simple speech application which compiles as a dialog-based application. I have no idea how to send output to the console from a dialog-based app. For now I've resorted to sending output to an edit box. (Sending output to the edit box was much more complicated than I expected. I spent two hours trying to figure out just how to automatically scroll the damn thing.) I would rather send trace output to the console/stdout than use an edit box. I could create a new project in MS VC 6.0 as a console based application, which would give me easy access to the console, but I do not know windows programming well enough to restructure the speech app .