I once saw the source code of a winform
application and the code had a Console.WriteLine();
. I asked the reason for that and i was told that it was for debugging purposes.
Pls what is the essence of Console.WriteLine();
in a winform
and what action does it perform because when i tried using it, it never wrote anything.
It writes to the Console.
The end user won't see it, and to be honest its much cleaner to put it into a proper log, but if you run it through VS the Console window will populate.
Winforms are just console apps that show windows. You can direct your debug info to the console app.
As you can see in the below example there is a command that attaches the parent window then pumps info to it.
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace MyWinFormsApp
{
static class Program
{
[DllImport( "kernel32.dll" )]
static extern bool AttachConsole( int dwProcessId );
private const int ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS = -1;
[STAThread]
static void Main( string[] args )
{
// redirect console output to parent process;
// must be before any calls to Console.WriteLine()
AttachConsole( ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS );
// to demonstrate where the console output is going
int argCount = args == null ? 0 : args.Length;
Console.WriteLine( "nYou specified {0} arguments:", argCount );
for (int i = 0; i < argCount; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine( " {0}", args[i] );
}
// launch the WinForms application like normal
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault( false );
Application.Run( new Form1() );
}
}
}
Here is the resource for this example:http://www.csharp411.com/console-output-from-winforms-application/
You wouldn't really use it normally but if you've attached a Console or use AllocConsole, it will function like in any other console application and the output will be visible there.
For quick debugging, I prefer Debug.WriteLine
but for a more robust solution, the Trace class may be preferable.
It wouldn't perform anything unless the Console
was redirected to say the Output
window. Really, they should be leveraging Debug.WriteLine
instead.
The benefit of Debug.WriteLine
is that it gets optimized away when building in Release
mode.
NOTE: as pointed out by Brad Christie and Haedrian, apparently it will in fact write to the Console
window in Visual Studio when running a Windows Forms application. You learn something new every day!