Monitoring the progress of parfor in a deployed application

I have a deployed application that I'm running in Command Prompt. It uses a 'parfor' loop for some massive calculations. The problem is that I would like to somehow track the progress of the program. I have two specific questions:

a) At the lowest level, during the running of the program, I would at least like to see something displayed in the Command Line that would show me that the program is still working. When I'm running the program from within MATLAB, this is easy as I simply use the 'disp' or 'fprintf' functions to display some text at the beginning of each parfor iteration. However, when deploying the application, these two functions don't want to display anything anymore.

So do you have any other suggestions about this problem? How to display some text from within the parfor loop in a deployed application?

b) It would be even better, of course, if I could see the overall progress of the program. I've searched the File Exchange for appropriate programs, and I've found some solutions, for example this one: <http://www.mathworks.com.au/matlabcentral/fileexchange/32101-progress-monitor-progress-bar-that-works-with-parfor>

However, I'm really not sure if this is a fail-safe solution. For example, this code is basically writing some data to an external file and then reading it back during each iteration. But what would happen if two workers would try to open or write to the same file at the same time? Would this lead to a corrupt file?

Do you have any other suggestions about how to track the progress of a parfor loop in a fail-safe way?

I am using R2012b 32bit for Windows. Thank you very much for your help in advance!