How do I show a console output/window in a forms application?

Question

To get stuck in straight away, a very basic example:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;

class test
{ 
    static void Main()
    { 
        Console.W         


        

Answer 1

Perhaps this is over-simplistic...

Create a Windows Form project...

Then: Project Properties -> Application -> Output Type -> Console Application

Then can have Console and Forms running together, works for me

Answer 2

If you are not worrying about opening a console on-command, you can go into the properties for your project and change it to Console Application

.

This will still show your form as well as popping up a console window. You can't close the console window, but it works as an excellent temporary logger for debugging.

Just remember to turn it back off before you deploy the program.

Answer 3

You can call AttachConsole using pinvoke to get a console window attached to a WinForms project: http://www.csharp411.com/console-output-from-winforms-application/

You may also want to consider Log4net ( http://logging.apache.org/log4net/index.html ) for configuring log output in different configurations.

Answer 4

There are basically two things that can happen here.

Console output It is possible for a winforms program to attach itself to the console window that created it (or to a different console window, or indeed to a new console window if desired). Once attached to the console window Console.WriteLine() etc works as expected. One gotcha to this approach is that the program returns control to the console window immediately, and then carries on writing to it, so the user can also type away in the console window. You can use start with the /wait parameter to handle this I think.

Link to start Command syntax

Redirected console output This is when someone pipes the output from your program somewhere else, eg.

yourapp > file.txt

Attaching to a console window in this case effectively ignores the piping. To make this work you can call Console.OpenStandardOutput() to get a handle to the stream that the output should be piped to. This only works if the output is piped, so if you want to handle both of the scenarios you need to open the standard output and write to it and attach to the console window. This does mean that the output is sent to the console window and to the pipe but its the best solution I could find. Below the code I use to do this.

// This always writes to the parent console window and also to a redirected stdout if there is one.
// It would be better to do the relevant thing (eg write to the redirected file if there is one, otherwise
// write to the console) but it doesn't seem possible.
public class GUIConsoleWriter : IConsoleWriter
{
    [System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
    private static extern bool AttachConsole(int dwProcessId);

    private const int ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS = -1;

    StreamWriter _stdOutWriter;

    // this must be called early in the program
    public GUIConsoleWriter()
    {
        // this needs to happen before attachconsole.
        // If the output is not redirected we still get a valid stream but it doesn't appear to write anywhere
        // I guess it probably does write somewhere, but nowhere I can find out about
        var stdout = Console.OpenStandardOutput();
        _stdOutWriter = new StreamWriter(stdout);
        _stdOutWriter.AutoFlush = true;

        AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS);
    }

    public void WriteLine(string line)
    {
        _stdOutWriter.WriteLine(line);
        Console.WriteLine(line);
    }
}

Answer 5

Why not just leave it as a Window Forms app, and create a simple form to mimic the Console. The form can be made to look just like the black-screened Console, and have it respond directly to key press. Then, in the program.cs file, you decide whether you need to Run the main form or the ConsoleForm. For example, I use this approach to capture the command line arguments in the program.cs file. I create the ConsoleForm, initially hide it, then pass the command line strings to an AddCommand function in it, which displays the allowed commands. Finally, if the user gave the -h or -? command, I call the .Show on the ConsoleForm and when the user hits any key on it, I shut down the program. If the user doesn't give the -? command, I close the hidden ConsoleForm and Run the main form.

Answer 6

//From your application set the Console to write to your RichTextkBox 
//object:
Console.SetOut(new RichTextBoxWriter(yourRichTextBox));

//To ensure that your RichTextBox object is scrolled down when its text is 
//changed add this event:
private void yourRichTextBox_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    yourRichTextBox.SelectionStart = yourRichTextBox.Text.Length;
    yourRichTextBox.ScrollToCaret();
}

public delegate void StringArgReturningVoidDelegate(string text);
public class RichTextBoxWriter : TextWriter
{
    private readonly RichTextBox _richTextBox;
    public RichTextBoxWriter(RichTextBox richTexttbox)
    {
        _richTextBox = richTexttbox;
    }

    public override void Write(char value)
    {
        SetText(value.ToString());
    }

    public override void Write(string value)
    {
        SetText(value);
    }

    public override void WriteLine(char value)
    {
        SetText(value + Environment.NewLine);
    }

    public override void WriteLine(string value)
    {
        SetText(value + Environment.NewLine);
    }

    public override Encoding Encoding => Encoding.ASCII;

    //Write to your UI object in thread safe way:
    private void SetText(string text)
    {
        // InvokeRequired required compares the thread ID of the  
        // calling thread to the thread ID of the creating thread.  
        // If these threads are different, it returns true.  
        if (_richTextBox.InvokeRequired)
        {
            var d = new StringArgReturningVoidDelegate(SetText);
            _richTextBox.Invoke(d, text);
        }
        else
        {
            _richTextBox.Text += text;
        }
    }
}