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 :)