The activity log is useful for diagnosing problems with the integrated development environment (IDE). In particular, when the IDE attempts to load a package, information is written to the activity log.

Arguments

LogFile (Visual Studio 2005 and above)

Optional. If specified, and the file does not already exist, the file will be created. If the file cannot be created (e.g. due to insufficient write access), the log will be written to the non-localized APPDATA location instead (See below)

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)

1. Click Start

2. Click "Run..."

3. Type %APPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ActivityLog.xml

4. Press Enter