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Write to the Visual Studio output window

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The Output window in the Visual Studio IDE is a Tool Window that can be used to deliver status, diagnostics/logging, or any other informational text to the user. Unlike User Prompts, which might display a message box, the messages written to the Output window are only displayed if the user has the Output window visible in the IDE and your channel is selected in the Show output from dropdown list. The Output window becomes visible when the user selects View > Output menu from the main menu.

Get started

Important

The VisualStudio.Extensibility Output window APIs are currently in preview and are subject to change. Any extension that leverages these APIs may fail to work in future versions of Visual Studio and will need to be updated when a newer version of the APIs is released.

To get started, follow the create the project section in Getting Started section.

Work with the Output window

This guide is designed to cover the most common things you can do with the Output window:

Get an Output window channel

In order to write to the Output window, you need an Output window channel, which can be created by calling VisualStudioExtensibility.Views().Output.GetChannelAsync().

OutputWindowExtensibility.GetChannelAsync()

The GetChannelAsync() method has three parameters:

Parameter Type Required Description
identifier string yes A unique identifier for the channel.
displayNameResourceId string yes The name of the resource that contains the display name of the output window. This is what will be visible in the "Show output from:" dropdown menu in the Output pane.

For example, if you had a .resx resource file called MyStrings.resx with a resource named "OutputWindowDisplayName", you would use nameof(MyStrings.OutputWindowDisplayName) for this parameter.
cancellationToken CancellationToken yes The CancellationToken for the async operation.

Display name resource ID requirements

The current version of the Output window API requires that the display name for the Output window channel be stored in a resource file:

  • Add a .resx file (sample) and make sure it's configured with the ResXFileCodeGenerator in your project (sample).
  • Add an Extension class to your project, if it doesn't have one already (sample)
  • In the Extension class, override the ResourceManager property to return the ResourceManager corresponding to your .resx file.

Edit the .resx resource file

You can edit the resource file (in this case MyStrings.resx) by using the designer UI available in Visual Studio:

resx Designer

Alternatively, you can edit the resource file by editing the raw XML to add the following snippet:

  <data name="OutputWindowDisplayName" xml:space="preserve">
    <value>My Output window</value>
  </data>

Edit the .csproj Project File

Add the following to your .csproj project file (if you added the .resx file through the IDE, this might already be present):

  <ItemGroup>
    <Compile Update="MyStrings.Designer.cs">
      <DesignTime>True</DesignTime>
      <AutoGen>True</AutoGen>
      <DependentUpon>MyStrings.resx</DependentUpon>
    </Compile>
  </ItemGroup>
  
  <ItemGroup>
    <EmbeddedResource Update="MyStrings.resx">
      <Generator>ResXFileCodeGenerator</Generator>
      <LastGenOutput>MyStrings.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
    </EmbeddedResource>
  </ItemGroup>

Edit or add the Extension class

If your project doesn't already contain a class that derives from Extension, you need to add one like the simple one below (in this case called MyExtension.cs):

using System.Resources;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.Extensibility;

namespace MyProject
{
    public class MyExtension : Extension
    {
        protected override ResourceManager? ResourceManager => MyStrings.ResourceManager;
    }
}

If your project already contains such a class, you only need to add the line that sets the ResourceManager property.

Note

Make sure that the MyExtension class is in the same namespace as the MyStrings resource class, which defaults to the name of the project, unless you have overridden it.

Add the initialization code

This code can be in whichever class you intend to use to show output messages (such as a Command), but the important thing is that GetChannelAsync() can only be called once for a given Output window channel ID, so consider calling it in a one-time, initialization method such as InitializeAsync().

public override async Task InitializeAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
    string id = "MyOutputWindow";
    string displayNameResourceId = nameof(MyStrings.OutputWindowDisplayName);

     // To use this Output window Channel elsewhere in the class, such as the ExecuteCommandAsync() method in a Command, save this result to a field in the class.
    OutputWindow? outputWindow = await this.Extensibility.Views().Output.GetChannelAsync(id, displayNameResourceId, cancellationToken);
}

Write to the Output window

The OutputWindow instance obtained in Get an Output window channel has a System.IO.TextWriter property called Writer, which supports familiar operations for writing text, such as:

Example

This snippet could be used wherever you want to display a message in the Output window, such as in the ExecuteCommandAsync() method in a Command.

if (this.outputWindow != null)
{
    await this.outputWindow.Writer.WriteLineAsync("This is a test of the output window.");
}

Next steps

Learn more:

Look at sample code:

  • See the OutputWindowSample sample for a full example of creating an extension that uses the output window.