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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T09:10:33+00:00

Is there a way in Visual Studio (2008 if it matters) that I can,

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Is there a way in Visual Studio (2008 if it matters) that I can, in debug/break mode, write the contents of a variable to a text/XML file?

The scenario is that I have a long process running in debug and I have realised too late that I haven’t logged enough detail about the events that the process has been monitoring, but fortunately a history is still available within a variable in the code.

I could trawl through the tens of thousands of items in this list, but it’s not going to persist once I hit stop on the application … there is no obvious context option for this, but is there any way, a better way than manual? Or is there no hope and I just need to hit stop, re-tool the logging function and run the thing again?

Aside from trying to hit a breakpoint, modify the code and re-write to make a better logger, is there a way of not losing that in-memory data?

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  1. Editorial Team

    One way to do it would be to use the immediate window (menu Debug -> Windows -> Immediate). In the window that appears you can use the "?" to query the value of a variable.

    Assuming your history variable is a string you view its contents by typing the following in the immediate window:

    ?history

    You could copy and paste the output from there into a text file or alternatively ask Visual Studio to log all command window output. To do this type:

    >log "c:\test.log"
>? history
>log off

    Log is an alias for Tools.LogCommandWindowOutput and accepts the following parameters:

    Tools.LogCommandWindowOutput [filename] [/on|/off] [/overwrite]

    Check out the MSDN article Log Command Window Output Command for more information.
     

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