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Announcing MSBuild Structured Log: record and visualize your builds

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I’ve just published a new tool:

https://github.com/KirillOsenkov/MSBuildStructuredLog

It is an MSBuild logger that can be passed to MSBuild during a build and it records information about everything that happens in the build. But instead of just dumping everything into a huge text file it preserves the structure and relationships between elements, and lets you save and open the structured log in .xml format. This has significant advantages to help you understand and navigate large build logs.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Screenshot1

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2016
    This is cool!
  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2016
    Hi,Seems nice.It would be great to have such a display inside VSTS logs (online)Regards
  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2016
    That's awesome. Adding timings would make it great for profiling as well. Check out http://msbuildprofiler.codeplex.com/. I initially wrote that, but it's not maintained anymore.
  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2016
    Super cool! This should help out with figuring out and sifting through all the ridiculous amounts of activities that occur during builds. It would be cool to see MSBuild integrate w/ Serilog as well... EVEN COOLER would be to see Seq integration, too! :) :) :)
  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2016
    This tool just saved my day, at the same time as I've discovered it.I had just written a custom targets file which didn't work correctly. Each second build, IntermediateClean would remove an important output.It would have been very time consuming to delve through the logs in text form only, hardly seeing the structure of the build.With this tree view, I found and fixed the defect in a reasonable amount of time.Thank you!
  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2016
    Thanks! I'll try it! and think which use can I do it