Visual Studio log file

loggingvisual-studio-2008

My Visual Studio 2008 Professional gave me the following error:

An error has occurred in the
application. For more information
please see the log file. Its path is
listed in the About box.

Riiight. I went to the About box, and there is nothing about a log file. And the System Info button has so much information, that I can't even figure out where to look for information on the location of a log file. I tried the find, using 'log', and finally gave up — there are too many 'dialog' and other false positives found.

So, where is that log file?

Visual Studio 2008, version 9.0.30729.1 SP; MS .NET framework version 3.5 SP1.

Best Answer

From the documentation of the /Log command line switch:

If LogFile is not specified, two files will be written to the current user's non-localized application data folder. The non-localized application data folder for Visual Studio can be found from the APPDATA environment variable. For example, for Visual Studio 2008, the folder is %APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0, where %APPDATA% represents the value in the APPDATA environment variable.

The two files are, by default, called ActivityLog.xml and ActivityLog.xsl. The former contains the activity log data and the latter is an XML style sheet which provides a more convenient way to view the XML file. To view the Activity log in your default XML viewer (e.g. Internet Explorer)

You will probably have to run devenv with the /Log switch for these files to be created. Visual Studio doesn't seem to log anything by default.

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