Console Window never appears in Visual Studio 2015

Question

There appears to be a bug in Visual Studio 2015 where you can run a console application once and see the output window, and then never seen again when you run it after that.

No, the application is not executing so fast that I just do see it. You can see the .exe running in Task Manager and you have to End task to kill it.

Steps to reproduce:

• Create a new console application in Visual Studio 2015
• Just write Console.WriteLine("helllo!");Console.ReadLine();
• Run it once, see the window.
• Run it N more times, never see the window again.

This includes running with debugging and running without debugging.

Turning off "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" in the project properties has no effect.

You can run the .exe from the file system and see the console window fine, it only doesn't appear it run by Visual Studio.

Has anyone else see this problem?

Answer 1

For me the problem was I was running Visual Studio on a solution from a folder that was a symbolic link to a longer path. When I opened up the solution from the "real" source location and ran it I saw the Console output.

Answer 2

This was happening to me - I eventually figured out that if I ran a console command in the "Package Manager Console", then tried to run the console application, the console wouldn't appear.

If I simply didn't use the Package Manager Console in a fresh instance of Visual Studio, the problem wouldn't occur.

Answer 3

I too am having this issue. I'm not entirely sure as to why this is happening... Possibly a change which is new to Visual Studios 2015?

However, I've found a few work arounds for the time being until such time.

First, Console.Read(); prevents both the debug and built solution from closing.

Second, "Start without debugging" worked without Console.Read(); when attempting a debug.

Following this thread. Glad I'm not the only one who is a little bit confused!