Diagnostics and Tracing

There's a couple of options available for diagnosing what's going on under the hood of Shimmer.

Shimmer Logs

When Shimmer runs an installer or update, it logs details to the `%LOCALAPPDATA%\Shimmer\ directory on the user's machine.

The files are in a format {ApplicationName}.{ProcessId}.txt because of some scenarios where the same application could be installed and uninstalled.

[INFO][2013-09-19T08:43:26] UpdateManager: Uninstalling version '1.0.0.0'
[WARN][2013-09-19T08:43:26] InstallerHookOperations: Could not find any AppSetup instances
[INFO][2013-09-19T08:43:26] InstallerHookOperations: We have an exe: C:\Users\brendanforster\AppData\Local\ShimmerDesktopDemo\app-1.0.0.0\Shimmer.DesktopDemo.exe
[INFO][2013-09-19T08:43:26] InstallerHookOperations: Deleting shortcut: C:\Users\brendanforster\Desktop\Shimmer.DesktopDemo.lnk
[INFO][2013-09-19T08:43:26] InstallerHookOperations: Deleting shortcut: C:\Users\brendanforster\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\ShimmerDesktopDemo\Shimmer.DesktopDemo.lnk
[ERROR][2013-09-19T08:43:26] Utility: safeDeleteFileAtNextReboot: failed - C:\Users\brendanforster\AppData\Local\ShimmerDesktopDemo\app-1.0.0.0\Autofac.dll - 5

Windows Installer logs

For the advanced users (who also have access to the registry), you can enable tracing of the Windows Installer activity - which includes events outside of the Shimmer bootstrapper.

To enable this, create a registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer

Reg_SZ: Logging Value: voicewarmupx

This will generate a file under '%TEMP%' matching the application name whenever you install or uninstall an application.

More details about this are here.