Daniel Cazzulino's Blog

Here’s what we’re currently doing: we add an InitializeContext method to all DataContext-derived classes, which is called from all ctors:

    private void InitializeContext()
    {
#if DEBUG
        if (Debugger.IsAttached)
        {
            this.Log = new DebuggerTextWriter();
        }
#endif
    }

Note that the logger will only be set if a debugger is attached, so that it doesn’t pollute the output on a console app while you’re running it.

The DebuggerTextWriter is trivial too:

#if DEBUG
    internal class DebuggerTextWriter : TextWriter
    {
        public override void Write(string value)
        {
            Debugger.Log(0, "", value);
            Console.Write(value);
        }

        public override void WriteLine(string value)
        {
            Debugger.Log(0, "", value + Environment.NewLine);
            Console.WriteLine(value);
        }

        public override Encoding Encoding
        {
            get { return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8; }
        }
    }
#endif

In both cases I’m wrapping the code in #if DEBUG so that it doesn’t even go to production code. The debugger writer will write to the console output as well as the VS debugger output window.