Visual Studio 2017 causing problems - c++

Question

I'm a complete begginer when it comes to programming. I'm trying to learn using the book "Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++" and it recommended downloading Visual Studio to code (I was previously using Codeblocks).
I downloaded the newest version (2017), got the classic applications packet for C++ and created a project.
But when I wrote my first code
#include "stdafx.h"
#include "../../std_lib_facilities.h"
int main()
{
cout << "Hello world!";
keep_window_open();
return 0;
}
Visual Studio started to freak out. When I click the local debugger button, the console app goes to the taskbar, and when I click on it, I can't do anything with it. It jsut displays "Hello World!" but no "Please enter character to exit" as it should. It doesn't react to keyboard input. I can't close it (even if I use task manager and try to close the process manually). Only solution I found is clicking "continue" button in Visual Studio, but it's not very convenient to use as the app still doesn't quite work the way I want to. Is there a way to make it work like it does in codeblocks - I just put in code, click a button and I have a fully functional console app?
One thing that could cause it - I was getting an error about using , so following advice from the internet I added
#define _SILENCE_STDEXT_HASH_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS 1
at the beggining of the header std_lib_facilities.h
Any way someone could help me out? (Maybe I should just go back to Codeblocks and ignore Visual Studio? That doesn't seem like a good way though)

Answer 1

If you only want to have the behaviour of "Please enter character to exit", you could just include the cstdio header and use std::getchar() at the end. This will make sure the program does not exit until you press any key on the keyboard.
However, this method does not print out the message "Please enter a character to exit" so you would need to print it yourself using cout.
The main.cpp would end up looking something like this:
#include "stdafx.h"
#include <cstdio>
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
std::cout << "Hello World" << std::endl;
std::cout << "Please enter character to exit" << std::endl;
std::getchar();
return 0;
}