Coding Faster: Getting More Productive with Microsoft® Visual Studio®

01.13 Visual Studio Logging

VERSIONS	2005, 2008, 2010
CODE	vstipEnv0048

There’s no doubt Visual Studio is an awesome piece of software, but occasionally you might run into a problem loading it. Did you know that it comes with a logging switch? While the documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241272.aspx) is lacking, the community comment contributed by Paul Harrington on the Visual Studio team helps a great deal.

Essentially, the syntax is as follows:

devenv.exe /log [filename]

The [filename] is optional and, if not specified, the ActivityLog.xml file is called by default. The path is to the log file is:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\ActivityLog.xml

Give it a try. Go to the Visual Studio command prompt, and enter devenv.exe ...