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.
Posts
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.
We are still finding how to get this log in VS 2015....
This describes how to do this in VS 2015:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj651643.aspx
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.
@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.thanks for your post
thanks
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?
thanks
Any news about this? Or should I open a new thread?
this is what I call great answer. thanks a million
Awesome thanks
This was really helpful
What about when all that the build log says is build failed?
@AnnMarieTorres - With a 'Build failed. See the build log for details' problem the IDE log (Help - Open Log Directory) should contain the error. This is typically an internal VS Mac error not an MSBuild error.