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

Question

this one should work.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    AllocConsole();
}

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
[return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)]
static extern bool AllocConsole();

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

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.

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.