How to capture console output from a service C#?

Question

We have a C# service that is deployed to a remote customer system. The application writes a substantial amount of \"diagnostic\" information to the console (i.e. Console.WriteL

Answer 1

In general, you should avoid writing diagnostic information directly to Console, the Event Log, MSMQ or elsewhere from your application code. Instead call a logging API, and use configuration to redirect the output wherever you want.

For example, you could replace all the Console.WriteLine by Trace.WriteLine (*). Then you can redirect output to the console, a file or elsewhere by modifying the application configuration file: for example to output to the console, use a ConsoleTraceListener, something like:

While debugging, you'll get your output on the console - on the customer site you'd configure it to redirect the trace output to a file, to the event log or similar.

Even better, use a 3rd party logging framework (I'd recommend Log4Net) which will give you more options than System.Diagnostics.Trace.

(*) Trace.Write/Trace.WriteLine are the same as Debug.Write/Debug.WriteLine, except that the latter are only compiled if the DEBUG symbol is defined. So prefer Trace to Debug if you want the output to be available in Release builds.