.Net Logging

[TheGreatAndPowerfulOz]

I think he was just giving a very basic example to illustrate his point. Sheesh

#SupportHeForShe Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun

[Uwe Laas]

Sure that works, but please, change it to log to windows event log or syslog. No new build allowed.

[Mehdi Gholam]

That's why I wrote Mini Drop-in Replacement for log4net[^]

[Didjeeh]

I wrote my own logger for that reason (and because it is fun to write stuff). If it is useful for you, you can check it out here: GitHub - sizingservers/sizingservers.log: An application logger for any 64 bit .Net 4.5 (and up) Windows desktop (maybe other app types) app.[^] Cheers

[SonnyHarbour]

This works better for me

LogFile = string.Format("{0}\\MyLogFile.txt", Path.GetDirectoryName(path));

[Sander Rossel]

Personally, I've never needed to debug live systems. Well, once... Because my logger failed! Really, the software worked as expected, except for the logging :~ All the other times an exception log sufficed to fix the problem :)

Best, Sander arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript SQL Server for C# Developers Succinctly Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly

[Xmen Real]

Finally someone said what I felt. I ended up making my own way simpler logger than using the prebuilt ones. They were supposed to be easy, but no, you have to spend way too much time on learning their API and structure.

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----------------------------------------------- 128 bit encrypted signature, crack if you can

[Johann Gerell]

Nothing is wrong with that "at the most basic level", but when you're in a heavily multithreaded/concurrent/async/parallel environment with extreme demands for low latency and high throughput, you need a logging system that doesn't negatively affect the required functionality of the application, doesn't block anything, and doesn't garble data due to likely concurrent logging resource access. As your basic example is written, it will surely "work" for most simple desktop user scenarios where the time it takes for the user to make a mouse click is 10 times higher than the time to complete a call to Logger::Info(), and nothing complicated is happening concurrently. That said, it would *never* work in a game, in a VoIP app, in a high-grequency stock trading app.

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russel

[BinaryReason]

Are you seriously suggesting re-inventing the wheel?

"There are only 10 types of people in the world - those who know binary and those who don't."

[BinaryReason]

You're doing something wrong. With NLog, all you need to do is include a nlog.config file in your project, and then to log you simply do the following:

static Logger _logger = LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger();

_logger.Log(LogLevel.Info, "Your message");

"There are only 10 types of people in the world - those who know binary and those who don't."

[den2k88]

Same old argument. If the existing wheels don't fit your needs you create the right wheels. A developer who doesn't do as much isn't worth a dime - baceause creating tools is precisely programmers' work.

CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++*      Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver "Go ahead, make my day"

[Marc Clifton]

Logging to a text file is obsolete. [PaperTrailApp](https://papertrailapp.com/). ;) I use this pretty much exclusively nowadays, writing to it over UDP is trivial:

byte[] buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(message);
socket.SendTo(buffer, endPoint);

And it's been really helpful to be able to view logs from anywhere. If it's at all interesting to you. :) Marc

V.A.P.O.R.ware - Visual Assisted Programming / Organizational Representation Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802

[Howard Hoffman 0]

IMO there are at least 2 advantages to those frameworks: - Separating the decision of what to log from the decision of "where" to place the log - Allowing you to change your mind post installation (via a watched external config file) Been using both web systems for almost 20 years. I've been continually glad for the ability to diagnose problems in the field in a straightforward way using mechanisms that are publicly documented and widely understood. Countless real bugs have been quickly identified and resolved thanks to this instrumentation.

[JackPeacock]

What happens when you start the second instance of the program? What happens when you run it as a service? How do you look at the log remotely, while the program is running locally? Windows already has event logging that work well, using WMI. Remotely accessible, fits in with enterprise operations management frameworks, no file droppings in local directories, no need to reinvent the wheel. Log4Net et al. are solutions that fit problems when logging expands to larger enterprise systems. Silly log files quickly break down when complexity increases.

[PIEBALDconsult]

I still use PhotoShop 7 (2002) -- it has never suddenly changed how it works. Nor has Office 2003.

[Michael Shoemaker]

I AGREE 10,000% !!!! Excellent post! I did pretty much exactly what you did.. I looked at those logger and went "WTF.. this is WAY overcomplicated so I wrote something MUCH simpler very similar to yours.

[ScottM1]

I used Log4Net a while back but I thought at the time that it seemed to be overkill for what I wanted it to do. Glad I'm not the only one.

[ranman22]

Funny co-incidence! I _just_ got done dealing with existing log4net code that wasn't set up to work with multiple threaded entities (the way it was being used in our project) ...so my choices were to: 1) learn the overly complex log4net API and add add even more external dependencies to our several DLLs that were using it 2) write about 30 lines of code to create a thread safe generic logging API that did the same thing ...I saved a bunch of time and removed an external dependency by going with option 2 :)

[James Curran]

The problem really isn't with the logger, but with the documentation (and I'm including article here on CodePRoject in that). For log4net (and for most other loggers, and most add-in libraries in general for that matter), there are: - things you do every time you want to log something. - things you do once for every class which logs something. - things you do once for each application which logs something. - things you do once in your lifetime. To understand how you use the logger, they should be explained in that order -- the thing you do the most taught first and with the most text. However, most go with a chronologic order -- exactly the reverse -- so you are bogged down with pages & pages of "configuration" documentation --- which in a real application will result one line of code.

Truth, James

[Jeremy Falcon]

Oh snap. :-D

Jeremy Falcon