VSColorOutput by Blue Onion Software simplifies large logs analysis in the Visual Studio Output window coloring important lines:
Colored build results in the Output window in Visual Studio 2010
For example, C++ developers often need to look at the output to find the origin of an error that involves several template instantiations:
Template instantiations log
In practice, the most important line in this log includes a reference to a file in the current solution. With VSColorOutput it is easy to highlight lines with references to files in the solution and downplay lines with references to standard include files:
Colored template instantiations log
You can classify output lines for your needs using .NET regular expressions. To open the RegExClassification Collection Editor dialog go to Tools – Options – VSColorOutput:
VSColorOutput settings in the Visual Studio Options dialog
For example, to color build results red when build fails, you can use the following regex “Build: \d+ succeeded( or up-to-date)?, (?!0)\d+ failed” with the classification type LogError and position this member before the “(=====|—–),BuildHead” member as the first member match wins:
RegExClassification Collection Editor
Red build results on a build error
Note that after modifying classification rules you need to regenerate output (e.g. rebuild) to see the changes. You can customize colors for each output line type going to Tools – Options – Environment – Fonts and Colors:
Color settings for different output line types
VSColorOutput colors trace messages in the Output window during debugging as well. Actually, this was author’s original idea for the extension:
Coloring trace messages during a debug session
VSColorOutput also supports Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview:
Colored build results in the Output window in Visual Studio 11
You can download the free VSColorOutput extension for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 11 from Visual Studio Gallery. You can get source code for the extension from Codeplex.
https://tabsstudio.com/
Making Visual Studio perfect 
Version 1.2 includes a new feature: Stop build on first error.
Seriously. How is this not the most downloaded plugin for VS. This thing is awesome. Thank you!! I agree with the author that although the build and find highlighting is nice, where this really shines is in debugging. Every large project I’ve ever worked on has some formatted debugging output which is Log4J-like, and the ability to write custom regexs for filtering is just awesome.
The other thing that inevitably happens, is someone mis-types LogInfo() instead of LogError() for an important error, and you might miss it. Not with this! You can add some simple error regexs to catch common error expressions.