A logger for MSBuild that records a structured representation of executed targets, tasks, property and item values.
The app updates automatically via Squirrel (after launch it checks for updates in background), next launch starts the newly downloaded latest version.
- .NET Framework 4.6
- MSBuild 14.0 or 15.0
- Visual Studio 2015 or 2017
The logger is in a single file called StructuredLogger.dll. It is available in a NuGet package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Build.Logging.StructuredLogger
You can either build your solution yourself and pass the logger:
msbuild solution.sln /t:Rebuild /v:diag /noconlog /logger:StructuredLogger,%localappdata%\MSBuildStructuredLogViewer\app-1.0.89\StructuredLogger.dll;1.buildlog
or you can build the solution or open an existing log file through the viewer app:
Logger supports two formats: *.xml (for large human-readable XML logs) and *.buildlog (compact binary logs). Depending on which file extension you pass to the logger it will either write XML or binary. The viewer supports both formats and defaults to binary. The binary log can be up to 200x smaller and faster.
Read more about the log formats here: https://github.com/KirillOsenkov/MSBuildStructuredLog/wiki/Log-Format
- Displays double-writes (when files from different sources are written to the same destination during a build, thus causing non-determinism)
- Displays target dependencies for each target
- Text search through the entire log
- Ctrl+C to copy an item and the entire subtree to Clipboard as text
- Delete to hide nodes from the tree (to get uninteresting stuff out of the way)
- Open and save log files (ask a friend to record and send you the log which you can then investigate on your machine)
Open an issue if you're running into something weird and I can take a look into it. If MSBuildStructuredLog crashes during the build, it will attempt to write the exception call stack to:
%localappdata%\Microsoft\MSBuildStructuredLog\LoggerExceptions.txt