Format all IDE warnings and errors consistently
Please format all IDE warnings and message like the C++ compiler does, i.e. like this:
"FullPath(LineNumber): error|warning IDExxxx: Message string."
C:\Foo\Bar\Mine.sln(1): error IDE4711: The selected file is a solution file, but was created by a newer version of this application and cannot be opened.
Reason: We use a separate PC and scripts to build our entire code base every night. The - very long - build log is parsed and summarized into an HTML file that highlights all warnings and errors.
Yesterday, the following error message appeared in the log file:
"The selected file is a solution file, but was created by a newer version of this application and cannot be opened.
The operation could not be completed. Unspecified error" and MSBuild returned error code 1
It is quite inconvenient to have to extend the parser again and again over time to recognize the errors by matching long literal strings and of course it degrades its performance more and more.
Frank Heimes commented
This would indeed ease the task of reading and parsing the output log file.
However, a project build is a multi-step process involving various different tools including special purpose customer scripts that all produce some sort of output.
It may be difficult to create a contiguous XML file with a valid syntax from the output of all those processes. So, plain text is the smallest common denominator.
A Delphes commented
I would extend this idea further to produce a build/errors/warnings log in a consistent XML format, rather than some arbitrary line-based format.