Installing Silverlight 2 on Visual Studio 2008 without getting the event log file is full error

Posted on: 2012-01-10

The event log file is full error

This is what I was getting the day I had to install Silverlight 2 on a Visual Studio 2008 software. I have Visual Studio 2010 working with Silverlight 4 but this project is older and required to have a previous version of C# and Silverlight.

I got told to install the Silverlight 2 Tool for Visual Studio 2008.

This tool is 74.4 megs and named Silverlight_tools.exe which can be found on Microsoft web site.

So far, all is straight forward and the installation is a Wizard that will require you to close all Microsoft Internet Explorer instance and all Visual Studio (2008 and 2010).

The problem come when installing. An error can occur saying that the Event Log file is full.

You can have the detail of the error by clicking View the Log File. This will open a browser where you can see all the installation trace.

This is where something need to be done which is not clear. First we may think to clear the Windows Event Log. This can be done by selecting one by one all Log category. Select properties and Clear log.

You can see when the logs are cleared if you come back into the screen. You will see that the size of each categories are now really low if not zero.

Even before clearing the log I was pretty sure that wouldn't solve the problem because all my logs properties had the feature to erase old log if space was required.

As I believed, the error was still there with the same message.

My second thought was to download the Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK which seem not to be there on my computer. I had the 3 and the 4 but not the 2. This file is still available on Microsoft Website and is smaller than the Microsoft Tool with 50.2 megs.

The installation was successful.

But, still couldn't load the Silverlight project for Visual Studio 2008. I decided to run again the Silverlight 2 Tools kit but without much success.

This lead me to go back into the Microsoft Event Viewer to see what happen since the clean up. I had few entries since I had try to install the Tool package once before installing Silverlight 2 SDK and one other time after. The log is not in error but contain a link to the Html log that contain the message with the error. I also noticed that SPInstaller is not available.

This haven't gave me any other idea than cleaning the %TEMP% folder but doesn't give any better result.

So I decided to give a try by searching on Google.com "Microsoft Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1". Maybe their some other tools for Visual Studio 2008. I got a surprise to see that Visual Studio 2008 does have a tools for Silverlight 3. I give it a try and at my big surprise, see the installation getting a lot longer.

After 10 minutes, the installation was successful.

I decided to give a try to the solution which needed to load the Silverlight project.

And this time it worked!

To fix this error, I had to install Silverlight 3 Tools.