In addition to doing some fun/weird/useful/annoying things in Console applications, we can also set foreground and background colours.

To set colours we use the Console.BackgroundColor and Console.ForegroundColor properties.

When we set these properties we supply a ConsoleColor. To reset the colours back to the defaults we can call the ResetColor() method.

using System;

namespace ConsoleColorDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Default initial color");

            Console.BackgroundColor = ConsoleColor.White;
            Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Black;
            Console.WriteLine("Black on white");
            Console.WriteLine("Still black on white");

            Console.ResetColor();

            Console.WriteLine("Now back to defaults");

            Console.ReadLine();

        }
    }
}

The above code produces the following output:

We can enumerate the available Console colours. The following code prints all the colours:

var allColors = Enum.GetValues(typeof (ConsoleColor));

foreach (var c in allColors)
{
    Console.ForegroundColor = (ConsoleColor)c;
    Console.WriteLine(c.ToString());
}

This produces the following output:

For more console related tips, check out my Building .NET Console Applications in C# Pluralsight course.

You can start watching with a Pluralsight free trial.

SHARE: