Display a message in Visual Studio's output window when not debug mode?

Question

In Java, you can use System.out.println(message) to print a message to the output window.

What\'s the equivalent in Visual Studio ?

I know when I\'m

Answer 1

To write in the Visual Studio output window I used IVsOutputWindow and IVsOutputWindowPane. I included as members in my OutputWindow class which look like this :

public class OutputWindow : TextWriter
{
  #region Members

  private static readonly Guid mPaneGuid = new Guid("AB9F45E4-2001-4197-BAF5-4B165222AF29");
  private static IVsOutputWindow mOutputWindow = null;
  private static IVsOutputWindowPane mOutputPane = null;

  #endregion

  #region Constructor

  public OutputWindow(DTE2 aDte)
  {
    if( null == mOutputWindow )
    {
      IServiceProvider serviceProvider = 
      new ServiceProvider(aDte as Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider);
      mOutputWindow = serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(SVsOutputWindow)) as IVsOutputWindow;
    }

    if (null == mOutputPane)
    {
      Guid generalPaneGuid = mPaneGuid;
      mOutputWindow.GetPane(ref generalPaneGuid, out IVsOutputWindowPane pane);

      if ( null == pane)
      {
        mOutputWindow.CreatePane(ref generalPaneGuid, "Your output window name", 0, 1);
        mOutputWindow.GetPane(ref generalPaneGuid, out pane);
      }
      mOutputPane = pane;
    }
  }

  #endregion

  #region Properties

  public override Encoding Encoding => System.Text.Encoding.Default;

  #endregion

  #region Public Methods

  public override void Write(string aMessage) => mOutputPane.OutputString($"{aMessage}\n");

  public override void Write(char aCharacter) => mOutputPane.OutputString(aCharacter.ToString());

  public void Show(DTE2 aDte)
  {
    mOutputPane.Activate();
    aDte.ExecuteCommand("View.Output", string.Empty);
  }

  public void Clear() => mOutputPane.Clear();

  #endregion
}

If you have a big text to write in output window you usually don't want to freeze the UI. In this purpose you can use a Dispatcher. To write something in output window using this implementation now you can simple do this:

Dispatcher mDispatcher = HwndSource.FromHwnd((IntPtr)mDte.MainWindow.HWnd).RootVisual.Dispatcher;

using (OutputWindow outputWindow = new OutputWindow(mDte))
{
  mDispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Normal, new Action(() =>
  {
    outputWindow.Write("Write what you want here");
  }));
}