See VSTO console output without using a console application

Question

I've been trying to step through example code that I've found and much of it uses Console.WriteLine which doesn't seem to work unless I start over with a new console application. How can I make this work in an existing application that wasn't initially set up a as a console app?

Answer 1

In a VSTO application, you likely have an app which is not a "console enabled" application. And if there is not console window in your application, then by default the strings you write using Console.WriteLine() are simply discarded.

You should use another function: Debug.WriteLine(), instead of Console.WriteLine. That way, the output will be available in your Visual Studio environment (when application is ran in 'debug' mode):

• either in the "immediate window" tab (Visual Studio => Menu Debug => Windows => Immediate)

• or in the "output" tab, when you choose "Debug" in the combobox "Show output from" (Visual Studio => Menu View => Other Windows => Output)

If you absolutely need to use Console.WriteLine() (because for example this is used by a third party lib of your project), you can override the default output of this function with Console.SetOut, which accepts a StreamWriter as parameter. For example, to output the logs in a file, you can put in application startup:

logFile = new System.IO.StreamWriter("C:/myLogs.txt");
Console.SetOut(logFile);