Write to the console in .net MAUI

Question

Good day everyone,

i have a problem with MAUI. I am running a MAUI project that acts as a UI to configurate a capture device that is used to capture network traffic and display this in Wireshark using a custom extcap.

The two programs work in tandem, as Wireshark starts the MAUI program by calling it on a command line with parameters.

The problem is, Wireshark is communicating by reading of and writing to a console. This means I need to write from the MAUI application to the console it was started from by Wireshark.

I tried both Console.WriteLine as well as a Trace.Listener without success.

 string interfaceString = "interface {value=" + capturer.Name + "}{display=" + capturer.Name + " Capture Interface}";
 Console.WriteLine(interfaceString);

 Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(Console.Out));
 Trace.WriteLine(interfaceString);

My question now is, is there a way to write to the console, or is it in fact impossible to get MAUI to communicate via the console. It would be sufficient to me if a solution for Windows exists.

Answer 1

To finish this up for anyone who has the same problem: As it is simply not possible to access the console MAUI runs from, it is the best idea to use a small middleware program.

This middleware is called by wireshark and starts the MAUI UI in a new thread. In MAUI itself, we can then reroute the output to the middleware that catches it and writes it back to Wireshark.

Middleware:

Process p = new Process();
try
{
    p.StartInfo.FileName = pathToEXE;
    p.StartInfo.Arguments = $"im an arg";
    p.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
    p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
    p.StartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
    p.StartInfo.ErrorDialog = true;
    p.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = Path.GetDirectoryName(pathToEXE);
    p.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;
    p.Start();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
   Console.WriteLine("Could not start MAUI: " + ex);
}
    
while (!p.HasExited)
{
    Console.Out.Write(p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd());
}
Console.WriteLine(p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd());

MAUI Windows App.xaml.xs

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern bool AllocConsole();

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern bool AttachConsole(int pid);

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern bool FreeConsole();

private static extern bool FreeConsole();

bool parentConsole = AttachConsole(Int32.Parse(processID)

The process id must be transfered to MAUI as a command line argument.