I'm building this application in Visual Studio 2010 using C#.
Basically there are 2 files, form1.cs (which is the windows form) and program.cs (where all the logic lies).
//form1.cs
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
//runButton_click function
}
//program.cs
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
while(blah-condition)
{
//some calculation
Console.WriteLine("Progress " + percent + "% completed.");
}
}
}
There is a Run button and a blank textbox.
When the user hits the Run button, program.cs will perform some task and constantly printing out the progress using Console.WriteLine()
onto the console (command prompt).
Question: How can I print to the textbox on form1 instead of printing into command prompt? I will need to print the progress constantly without any user action.
Thanks in advance!
By the way, it doesn't have to be a textbox, it can be a label or something else that can take text. I chose textbox because it makes more sense to me.
Start by creating a new TextWriter
that is capable of writing to a textbox. It only needs to override the Write
method that accepts a char
, but that would be ungodly inefficient, so it's better to overwrite at least the method with a string.
public class ControlWriter : TextWriter
{
private Control textbox;
public ControlWriter(Control textbox)
{
this.textbox = textbox;
}
public override void Write(char value)
{
textbox.Text += value;
}
public override void Write(string value)
{
textbox.Text += value;
}
public override Encoding Encoding
{
get { return Encoding.ASCII; }
}
}
In this case I've had it just accept a Control
, which could be a Textbox
, a Label
, or whatever. If you want to change it to just a Label
that would be fine.
Then just set the console output to a new instance of this writer, pointing to some textbox or label:
Console.SetOut(new ControlWriter(textbox1));
If you want the output to be written to the console as well as to the textbox we can use this class to create a writer that will write to several writers:
public class MultiTextWriter : TextWriter
{
private IEnumerable<TextWriter> writers;
public MultiTextWriter(IEnumerable<TextWriter> writers)
{
this.writers = writers.ToList();
}
public MultiTextWriter(params TextWriter[] writers)
{
this.writers = writers;
}
public override void Write(char value)
{
foreach (var writer in writers)
writer.Write(value);
}
public override void Write(string value)
{
foreach (var writer in writers)
writer.Write(value);
}
public override void Flush()
{
foreach (var writer in writers)
writer.Flush();
}
public override void Close()
{
foreach (var writer in writers)
writer.Close();
}
public override Encoding Encoding
{
get { return Encoding.ASCII; }
}
}
Then using this we can do:
Console.SetOut(new MultiTextWriter(new ControlWriter(textbox1), Console.Out));