Things that keep me up at night

I write this to help all you technical warriors out there who get shitty advice from the Microsoft Forums and other profound idiots about the 0x80092002 error in SCCM - usually to do with PXE booting but can manifest in other ways around DP -> MP communications. The tricky one about this error is that it happens even if you are only using HTTP communication and not HTTPS/TLS. So to get an error about certificates is somewhat confusing. What the uneducated masses of the internet will tell you is to re-install the PXE role over an over. This will do nothing. Then they will tell you to re-install your management point and effectively re-build your entire infrastructure. This will  work, but only because it is the nuclear option and will run the step that actually makes a difference as a matter of course. So, here it is folks. If you have these kinds of errors in your logs: PXE::MP_InitializeTransport failed; 0x80092002 SMSPXE 22/03/2017 2:45:58 PM 4144 (0x1030) ...

So ages ago I wrote about using ETW as the proper way to log in .NET apps that run on Windows. This is still true. But now the tooling is even better. A shortfall always was that the auto generated manifest couldn't be installed into the event log and use standard event log collection tools to gather logs. There is a package on Nuget that fills in the gaps -  EventSource beta . It's a beta package but seems to be OK. So go forth, and do structured logging, for the sake of yourselves and your operators.

Every now and then I go and have a bit of search around for the recommended patterns and practices around incorporating logging in your application code. It seems that this particular subject is one of those ones where someone said something a long time ago which has then been propagated to every nook and cranny of the internet until there is no room for argument or any contrarian views to be expressed. I am of course talking about the canonical answers given for .NET logging questions which are - Just use log4net  and Use Aspect Oriented Programming for logging Well, I must offer a contrarian view on both of these points. I'll start with log4net and simply say that I agree wholeheartedly with this Stack Overflow post  which effectively says that from .NET 2.0, TraceSource is built in and is a very effective mechanism to log whatever you need logged. It is also extremely extensible and you would really need some unique edge case to require something else. I ...

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...