(Header image from here.)

Several times in the last few months I've found myself in some kind of awkward situation where I need to debug a C♯ program, but the program in question either doesn't have a console, or is on a remote machine. In an ideal world, I'd like to have all my debugging message sent to my development machine for inspection. That way I don't have to check the console of multiple different machines just to get an idea as to what has gone wrong.

C♯ already has System.Diagnostics.Debug, which functions similarly to the Console class, except that it sends data to the Application output window. This is brilliant for things running on your local machine through Visual Studio or MonoDevelop, but not so great when you've got a program that utilises the network and has to run on separate computers. Visual Studio for one starts to freeze up if you open the exact same repository on a network drive that's already open somewhere else.

It is for these reasons that I finally decided to sit down and write TeleConsole. It's a simple remote console that you can use in any project you like. It's split into 2 parts: the client library and the server binary. The server runs on your development machine, and listens for connections from the client library, which you reference in your latest and greatest project and use to send messages to the server.

Take a look here: sbrl/TeleConsole (GitLab) (Direct link to the releases page)

The client API is fully documented with intellisense comments, so I assume it should be very easy to work out how to use it (if there's something I need to do to let you use the intellisense comments when writing your own programs, let me know!). If you need some code to look at, I've created an example whilst testing it.

Although it's certainly not done yet, I'll be definitely be building upon it in the future to improve it and add additional features.