With the availability of the first Beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft has also updated the range of solutions orbiting around its development platform and tools. One illustrative example in this regard is the Collect.exe log collection utility. The tool was updated and tailored to the successor of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. The Redmond company is asking testers running the Beta development milestones of Visual Studio 2010 Beta and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta to download the utility and use it to collect logs for submission when bugs are reported to the support website.

“While we have worked hard to reduce install times and installation issues and hope you don’t encounter any, in case you do experience an issue we encourage you to gather and upload logs using our updated log collection utility available for download. This will automatically package a lot of logs and product information we can use to diagnose problems and compress them into %TEMP%\vslogs.cab by default,” Heath Stewart, software design engineer DDCPX, Microsoft, revealed.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta have been offered as public downloads starting on May 20, 2009. Stewart emphasized that the Collect.exe log collection utility was designed to help Microsoft deal with any issues testers came across during the setup process of the next version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework.

“If you encounter any setup issues, we will need all relevant logs. Please follow the instructions below to collect all those logs. Download collect.exe. You may choose to save the tool for later use, or to run directly. The utility creates a compressed cabinet of all the VS and .NET logs to %TEMP%\vslogs.cab,” Stewart said. At the same time, he indicated that testers should initially check to see whether their issue hadn't been already submitted.
 
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 is available for download here.