Professional Visual Studio® 2008

41.3. Output Window

One of the first debugging windows you will encounter when you run your application for the first time is the Output window. By default, the Output window appears every time you build your application, and shows the build progress. Figure 41-3 shows the successful build of a sample solution. The final line of the Output window indicates a summary of the build, which in this case indicates three successfully built projects. In the output there is also a summary of the warnings and errors encountered during the build. In this case there were no errors, but there were three warnings. Although the Output window can be useful if for some reason the build fails unexpectedly, most of the time the errors and warnings are reported in the Error List.

Figure 41.3. Figure 41-3

The Output window has a secondary role as the standard output while the application is running. The drop-down on the left of the toolbar can be used to toggle between output sources. Figure 41-3 shows the output of the build, but as you perform other activities in Visual Studio, additional entries will be created in the drop-down list. For example, when you run your application in debug mode, Visual Studio will create an entry called Debug, which will display any messages that either the runtime or your code has emitted using Debug.Write or Debug.WriteLine. Likewise, a Refactor entry will be created ...