Question

I have a test project in Visual Studio. I use Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.

I add this line in one of my unit tests:

Console.WriteLine("Some foo was very angry with boo");
Console.ReadLine();

When I run the test, the test passes, but the console window is not opened at all.

Is there a way to make the console window available to be interacted via a unit test?

Answer 1

NOTE: The original answer below should work for any version of Visual Studio up through Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2013 does not appear to have a Test Results window any more. Instead, if you need test-specific output you can use @Stretch’s suggestion of Trace.Write() to write output to the Output window.

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The Console.Write method does not write to the "console" — it writes to whatever is hooked up to the standard output handle for the running process. Similarly, Console.Read reads input from whatever is hooked up to the standard input.

When you run a unit test through Visual Studio 2010, standard output is redirected by the test harness and stored as part of the test output. You can see this by right-clicking the Test Results window and adding the column named "Output (StdOut)" to the display. This will show anything that was written to standard output.

You could manually open a console window, using P/Invoke as sinni800 says. From reading the AllocConsole documentation, it appears that the function will reset stdin and stdout handles to point to the new console window. (I’m not 100% sure about that; it seems kind of wrong to me if I’ve already redirected stdout for Windows to steal it from me, but I haven’t tried.)

In general, though, I think it’s a bad idea; if all you want to use the console for is to dump more information about your unit test, the output is there for you. Keep using Console.WriteLine the way you are, and check the output results in the Test Results window when it’s done.