Output Debug and Trace Messages to Form

Question

My problem is similar to one posed by Joel Coehoorn some time ago when he wanted to Redirect Trace Output to Console.

In my case, I'd like to output to a ListView or TextBox or for that matter, any control which can accept text. For this purpose, I'd like to have a general purpose Trace/Debug listener which I can hook to in order to process the messages (convert to a ListViewItem or something) before outputting it.

Is there any way I can achieve this or do I have to build my own Trace Listener?

If it's worth noting, I run VS2010 ultimate & VS2008 professional.

Solution should be in preferably be in VB.NET but C# is okay.

Answer 1

You could implement your own TraceListener class. Walkthrough here

You could just implement the Write and WriteLine methods to do this. Initializing it would look something like this:

var myTraceListener = new ListViewTraceListener(listView);
Trace.Listeners.Add(myTraceListener);

Of course, this is assuming your class has a constructor that accepts a ListView.