Question

When i’m working with most projects, from winforms, consoles, WPF, if needed i can print out any information i want to check more easily at run time using a messagebox or the likes;

MessageBox.Show(whateveriwannashow);

However, i’m now working on a windows service, which doesn’t allow for the presence of any sort of GUI. What direction should i head in to show some information? Does VS2010 have a built in feature for this sort of stuff?

Answer 1

System.Diagnostics.Trace is your new best friend. Trace is output directly to the output window in Visual Studio, can be send to the logger or can be viewed using free third-party tools like SysInternals DebugView.

For debug work it beats logging hands down. here’s why:

1. It won’t leave great big log files on your drive. This means you can be really granular with trace and not leave big files on the disk.
2. If nothing is listening to the trace output it is basically lost in the ether.
3. You can watch the output in real-time using DebugView (and Exe with no external dependencies)
4. If you want to log it you can simply add a trace listener to your logger
5. It’s easy to set up
6. It writes to the output window by default.