How to Obtain Diagnostic Build Logs

JeffreyStedfast

One of the most valuable pieces of information that you, as a developer, can use to diagnose build problems with your Android, iOS, Mac, or any other type of application is the Build Log. Build Logs are also extremely useful to pass along to Xamarin when things go wrong with your build.

Enabling Diagnostic-Level Verbosity in Your Build Logs

To change the level of verboseness in your Build Logs, you'll need to open your Xamarin Studio Preferences dialog. On Mac, you can find this dialog by opening the Xamarin Studio menu and selecting the Preferences item. On Windows, you'll need to go to the Tools menu and select the Options item.

Once the dialog appears, navigate to the Build panel of the Projects section and you should see a Log verbosity setting. The log verbosity drop-down menu offers a number of possible verbosity levels, including Diagnostic (which is the most verbose).

Where To Find Your Build Log

You can find the Build Log for your project in the Errors output pad located at the bottom right of your Xamarin Studio IDE window (just below your Text Editor view):

Note: If you do not see the Errors button, then it might have been closed. To re-enable it, go to the View menu, navigate down to the Pads sub-menu and then select Errors.

Clicking the Errors button will display the Error Pad which contains the Build Log as well as the list of errors and warnings that occurred while building your project.

Note: You can easily copy the entire Build Log by using the Command-A shortcut to select all text and then using Command-C to copy the Build Log to your clipboard.

JohnAdams

Could this be annotated in some way such that Visual Studio 2015 users can do the same? I tried to "translate" from this IDE to VS2015 and failed to see detailed diagnostics.

QamarHafeezi

We are still finding how to get this log in VS 2015....

shea

This describes how to do this in VS 2015:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj651643.aspx

Hortinz

Is there any tool or way to parse this output? My app has 20 projects in it, it gets complicated to analise the data. Also while it's building the scroll just moves automatically which is really annoying.

JGoldberger

@Hortinz

I am not aware of any tool per se, but I find it useful to copy the entire build log and open it in a good text editor that has good searching option, like grep so you can search on regular expressions. Text Wrangler (available in the app store) is a good free option on macOS. Using the grep search, I usually search for the regular expression error|exception to quickly scan through any errors or exceptions that occurred during the build.

DJTTBax

thanks for your post

KingGames

thanks

TedRogers

Hi - my "Build Output" is getting truncated. Is is possible to get the build output saved to a file in addition to the "Build Output" view?

AsMax2017

thanks

johannes_schmitt

@TedRogers said:
Hi - my "Build Output" is getting truncated. Is is possible to get the build output saved to a file in addition to the "Build Output" view?

Any news about this? Or should I open a new thread?

XamarinRobert

If won't help, check your log files for details by going to Help menu and Open Log Directory.

For example by dragging & dropping the log folder into newly opened Terminal window, and run:

tail -f *.log
then run the build again and check the reported logs. Hit Control-C on Terminal when finished.

For better visibility, run:

tail -f *.log | grep -C5 -i error
You can also try to clear cache folder of VisualStudio, e.g.:

$ lsof -p $(pgrep VisualStudio)
$ rm -fr ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.visual-studio
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