Just a quick post – if you want to get a realtime view of the log files then you have a few options.

If like me you find opening the latest file and scrolling to the bottom a bit tiresome then the following options might help:

1. Dynamic log viewer – I discovered this tool as this ships with SIM – alternatively you can download the exe from http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/Text-editors/Dynamic-Log-Viewer.shtml. You need to select the latest file and it then watches the tail of the log file
2. DebugView – you need a couple things – the download from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/debugview.aspx  and a slight tweak to your log4net config to add a new appender (see below). The advantage here is the log always updates, you don’t need to select a new file each rebuild. When you run the app,
   1. Run as an administrator
   2. Turn on ‘Capture -> Capture Global Win32’
   3. Add a filter to match your config – ‘Edit -> Filter/Highlight -> Include – [xDBPrototype]‘

The new config you need adds a new appender into the <log4net> section of the web.config/sitecore.config (depending on your version of Sitecore):

Enjoy