MSBuildStructuredLog

A logger for MSBuild that records a structured representation of executed targets, tasks, property and item values. It can greatly simplify build investigations and provides a portable log interchange format (*.binlog) and a rich interactive log viewer app.

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Homepage: https://msbuildlog.com BinlogMcp: https://msbuildlog.com/binlogmcp Syntax: https://msbuildlog.com/syntax

Thanks to SignPath.io for providing a free code signing service and to the SignPath Foundation for a free code signing certificate to sign the installer.

Install:

Install from https://msbuildlog.com.

The app updates automatically via Squirrel (after launch it checks for updates in background), next launch starts the newly downloaded latest version.

Screenshot1

Installing the Avalonia version on Mac:

Download the latest release for arm64 or x64.

Alternatively, you can install from Homebrew:

brew install structuredlogviewer

Building & Running the Avalonia version on Mac/Linux:

git clone https://github.com/KirillOsenkov/MSBuildStructuredLog
cd MSBuildStructuredLog
./run.sh

Alternatively, a longer version:

dotnet build MSBuildStructuredLog.Avalonia.sln
dotnet publish MSBuildStructuredLog.Avalonia.sln --self-contained -o <some_dir> (I used $HOME/tools/artifacts/StructuredLogViewer.Avalonia)
make a script $HOME/bin/structured-log-viewer (or whatever's on your PATH):

#! /bin/sh
exec dotnet ${HOME}/tools/artifacts/StructuredLogViewer.Avalonia/publish/StructuredLogViewer.Avalonia.dll "$@"

Requirements:

Windows:

.NET Framework 4.7.2
MSBuild 17.0
Visual Studio 2022

Mac:

.NET SDK

Usage:

You can pass /bl switch to msbuild.exe or dotnet build to record a binary build log to msbuild.binlog, in the same folder as the project/solution being built:

Screenshot

or you can build the solution or open an existing log file through the viewer app:

Screenshot2

Features:

Preprocess project files (with all imports inlined), right-click on a project -> Preprocess
If a log has embedded files, you can view the list of files, full-text search in all files, and use the Space key (or double-click) on most nodes to view the source code.
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
Narrow down the search results using the under() or project() clauses to only display results under a certain parent or project.
Each node in the tree has a context menu. 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 (option to save log files to .xml)
Logs can include the source code project files and all imported files used during the build.

Investigating problems with MSBuildStructuredLog

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