Visual Studio log file

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

The solution mentioned above is misleading. The error message you mentioned basically originates from an Add-in caled VMDebugger. The location of their log file is available on the about box of the add-in. The path looks like this

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp\vmware-\vmware-vsid-2.log

I found the following entries in the log

6/4/2015 13:55:38: VMware Virtual Debugger loaded successfully.
6/4/2015 14:03:03: ERROR: pControls->get_Item(CComVariant(itemName), &pCtrl)
6/4/2015 14:03:03: An error occurred in .\Connect.cpp at line 8782. Error code is 0x80070057.
6/4/2015 14:03:03: An error has occurred in the application. For more information please see the log file.  Its path is listed in the About box.
6/4/2015 14:03:03: ERROR: pControls->get_Item(CComVariant(itemName), &pCtrl)
6/4/2015 14:03:03: An error occurred in .\Connect.cpp at line 8782. Error code is 0x80070057.
6/4/2015 14:03:03: An error has occurred in the application. For more information please see the log file.  Its path is listed in the About box.

Additional info: Visual studio 2010 logs are available at

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ActivityLog.xml %APPDATA% resolves to “C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming”