Terminal window for a WPF application for live console output

Question

I know this question has come up here a few times, unfortunately the answers are outdated or didn't give me the result I wanted. AllocConsole doesn't seem to work that way either.

I need a terminal window for a WPF application for live console output. Whether embedded or as an external window.

In my application I have data that reads network packets via Photon. So this happens all the time without a break. If there is a problem in my app, this is the easiest place to look for the error.

A direct connection to a console window would be best, but I would also be satisfied with my own version of a console if it does not require a multiple of performance.

Does anyone have an idea how I can best do this? Simply ObservableCollection and then output by list?

Are there already such notification solutions?

Answer 1

If you're using .NET Core, you can create another logging provider and stream those updates to a UI.

If that's too big a paradigm shift, you can create a log reader that streams updates from a file on disk to a UI by opening a read-only stream and seeking to the file's end. This way would let you keep your logging implementation but requires considerations such as

• Does the file exist? If not, start streaming when it comes into creation
• If the logs have a rolling interval, which one do you pick up and when do you switch?
• Filestreams don't always flush their contents to disk; you have to poke the file with a stick sometimes to get the log contents to flush.
• and other reading-from-disk headaches.

Answer 2

You might want to hop on over to the Terminal repo and show your support for microsoft/terminal#6999. We've got a WPF-backed terminal control in that repo that we've built, but it's not really production ready for third parties. Showing that you're interested in using it might help change the prioritization.