I wrote a post yesterday with a list of the names and locations of all of the log files produced during Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 setup.  As you can see in that post, the list of possible log files is very long, and that makes it annoying when attempting to gather the logs and send them back to Microsoft so that we can help troubleshoot installation issues.

Fortunately, Sandhya, a colleague of mine, has written a tool that will automatically gather all of the VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 setup log files it can find from your system and create a cab file containing them so you have a single compressed package that can be sent to Microsoft for troubleshooting purposes.

How to use the Collect tool

The tool can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/?LinkId=8967043.  It is a Win32 console application, so you can extract it from the zip file and double-click on it to run it.  It will create a file named %temp%\vslogs.cab on your system after it has gathered all of the log files.

Note - after the tool finishes running, you can get to your %temp% folder to find the file vslogs.cab by clicking on the Start menu, choosing Run, typing %temp% and clicking OK.

What to do if the Collect tool does not work correctly on your system

If the tool encounters any problems, you can do the following to re-run it from a cmd prompt and see more detailed error information:

1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK
2. Run collect.exe from the cmd prompt that appears
3. When doing this, you will see information displayed in the cmd prompt with more details about which actions it is performing, what log files it found, etc

<update date="5/23/2008"> Updated link to log collection tool to point to the new location </update>