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Visual Studio: Improve your build output with the BuildVision extension

This week I started a new Azure project together with 2 colleagues. While debugging an issue with Azure Service Fabric, I noticed that his build output looked completely different. He was using the BuildVision Visual Studio extension.

From the website:

BuildVision activates when Visual Studio starts the process of building, rebuilding or cleaning projects (solution).

BuildVision tool window and Visual Studio Status Bar displays the current state of the process, for example: "Build solution 'MyApplication' started at 18:24:12 ..." or "Clean project 'MyProject' completed successfully at 18:25:20".

During the process, for each project the following columns are updated: State, Build Start Time, Build End Time, Elapsed Time, etc., as well as Errors, Warnings and Messages produced by MSBuild.

Indicators Panel, which is located above the table of projects, displays total number of errors, warnings and messages produced by MSBuild, the number of failed projects and successfully processed.

What I liked about the tool is that it makes it very easy to see which projects are failing to build, which is not so obvious using the default build output.

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After installation, the tool is available from View –> Other Windows –> BuildVision

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Thanks Gert-Jan for the great tip!

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