Writing to output window of Visual Studio

Question

I am trying to write a message to the output window for debugging purposes. I searched for a function like Java\'s system.out.println(\"\"). I tried Debug

Answer 1

Add the System.Diagnostics namespace, and then you can use Debug.WriteLine() to quickly print a message to the output window of the IDE. For more details, please refer to these:

• How to trace and debug in Visual C#
• A Treatise on Using Debug and Trace classes, including Exception Handling

Answer 2

This requires a third party framework, namely Serilog, but I've nonetheless found it to be a very smooth experience with getting output to some place I can see it.

You first need to install Serilog's Trace sink. Once installed, you need to set up the logger like this:

Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .MinimumLevel.Verbose()
    .WriteTo.Trace()
    .CreateLogger();

(You can set a different minimum level or set it to a config value or any of the normal Serilog functionality. You can also set the Trace logger to a specific level to override configs, or however you want to do this.)

Then you just log messages normally and they show up in your Output window:

Logger.Information("Did stuff!");

This doesn't seem like such a big deal, so let me explain some additional advantages. The biggest one for me was that I could simultaneously log to both the Output window and the console:

Logger = new LoggerConfiguration()
    .MinimumLevel.Verbose()
    .WriteTo.Trace()
    .WriteTo.Console(standardErrorFromLevel: LogEventLevel.Error)
    .CreateLogger();

This gave me great flexibility in terms of how I consumed output, without having to duplicate all my calls to Console.Write with Debug.Write. When writing the code, I could run my command line tool in Visual Studio without fear of losing my output when it exited. When I had deployed it and needed to debug something (and didn't have Visual Studio available), the console output was readily available for my consumption. The same messages can also be logged to a file (or any other kind of sink) when it's running as a scheduled task.

The bottom line is that using Serilog to do this made it really easy to dump messages to a multitude of destinations, ensuring I could always readily access the output regardless of how I ran it.

It also requires very minimal set up and code.

Answer 3

The following worked for me in Visual Studio 2015:

OutputDebugStringW(L"Write this to Output window in VS14.");

Read the documentation for OutputDebugStringW here.

Note that this method only works if you are debugging your code (debug mode)

Answer 4

This is not an answer to the original question. But since I found this question when searching for a means of interactively dumping object data, I figured others may benefit from mentioning this very useful alternative.

I ultimately used the Command Window and entered the Debug.Print command, as shown below. This printed a memory object in a format that can be copied as text, which is all I really needed.

> Debug.Print <item>

  id: 1
  idt: null
  igad: 99
  igbd: 99
  gl_desc: "New #20"
  te_num: "1-001-001-020"

Answer 5

Print to the output window of the Visual Studio:

Debug.Writeline();

Answer 6

For me, only the Trace namespace and not the Debug one worked:

System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine("message");

I'm working in a C# project under Visual Studio 2010.