problem in assembling .asm file with masm

i am a newbie at assembly level programming....i use masm611.....though my computer is 64 bit i run masm on dosbox which enables it to run like 32 bit....i am working on my first .exe file creation and want to do each step involved myself.....i.e. i first will write .asm file convert it to .obj through masm then link it and then convert it to .exe....but the problem i keep facing is that when i make the .asm file(eg first.asm) ....the moment i go to masm and type ml first.asm it either says unable to open first.asm or in other cases produces a series of errors....so what i did is that i took a .asm code from masm manual(the code is attached with this question)...but then too it masm produced a series of errors and didnt assemble the file...please help??

 

have u edited ur asm file in notepad???
Generally while writing ur code in notepad and wen we save them
notepad saves them as txt file
at first select all files in file type tab while saving
then save ur file as .asm
or else it wil create filename.asm.txt
hope this wil solve ur problm...
Gudluck!!

 

thanks for the reply but i did it in an asm editor and am pretty sure that the the extension was .asm