Windows Installer Logging

Most of the applications do have Installation logs. But not all, few of the applications do not have log generation while installing.Log file creation starts during log in acrivity only. This is fairly common in Windows applications. If you are a tester testing the installation of these kind of windows applications & if you are finding bug in installation wizard, how do you find the log? Here installation logs are crucial, since developers need those logs for debugging purpose.

Here is a simple way of creating those installation logs via windows registry.

Navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer

and create a String (Reg_SZ) entry Logging with the value 'voicewarmupx' (each letter stands for various logs, but on the whole, this entry is like verbose mode of logging). You can find the log system's temp directory. (Temp directory can be found at Start->Run-> type %temp%, usually it will be C:\Documents and Users\\Local Settings\Temp). The log file's filename starts with MSI.