How to read the output window of Visual Studio in an efficient way?

Question

Do you know any guideline or if you have mastered your own way of reading the output window of the VS after a failed build to gather the most important notes in a shortest time?

Answer 1

well, may be the most efficient way to read build failures is the Error list window.

but may be it is useful to use the output window to track any exception occurred and handled implicitly, or to track any new loaded modules (assemblies).

or if you are using the build events, and there is a failure when running the dos commands, you can also see it in the output.

you can also write your own events to the output, using Debug.Write("");

and by the way, there are some frameworks (such as NHibernate) who log there events into the output window.