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Showing posts with the label event viewer

Writing to the event log in .NET - the right way

As a DevOper, I spend a lot of time instrumenting code. This involves adding stuff like performance counters, tracing and logging. One thing that constantly irks me when I go looking for ways or means to improve how I do my logging, is the complete and utter misinformation and misuse of the Windows Event Log. The problem relates to the canonical implementation of logging in .NET, log4net. Look at this method signature: void Info(object message); Note the lack of structure, the lack of context. Note the ability for a developer to put absolutely anything into the message object (which will be outputted as a string). When these types of messages are hooked up to an Event Log sink, the result is a generic message, usually in the Application log with a bit of free form text. Fairly useless for anyone to be able to filter and report on. The above style of logging is really more suited towards tracing and debug logging than actual operational logging, Why you should write operatio...