Using and extending System.Diagnostics trace logging
Essential.Diagnostics contains additional trace listeners, filters and utility classes for the
.NET Framework System.Diagnostics trace logging. Included are colored console (that allows custom formats), SQL database (including a tool to create tables), formatted rolling file trace listener, rolling XML trace listener and in-memory trace listeners, simple property and expression filters, activity and logical operation scopes, and configuration file monitoring.
Download
The preferred method to integrate Essential.Diagnostics with your project is via the
Essential.Diagnostics NuGet package, which contains just the binaries needed to use the extensions (the same files are in the Binaries only download).
For the example project, which runs using Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, download the
Essential.Diagnostics Complete package from CodePlex. The examples project contains a reference to the NuGet package.
Background
The
.NET Framework System.Diagnostics provides powerful, flexible, high performance logging for applications --
and the core capabilities are already built into the .NET Framework!
This project uses the inbuilt features of the System.Diagnostics namespace, and shows how logging and tracing can be integrated into a client application by taking advantage of existing .NET Framework features.
This project also provides a library that enhances System.Diagnostics through it's numerous built-in extension points, but shouldn't require any changes to existing code (that uses the .NET Framework logging) to use some or all of the features.
Extension features provided by this project are marked
-- other features are already provided by the .NET Framework you are using right now.
To see how you can use
System.Diagnostics and the
Essential.Diagnostics extensions see
Getting Started and the
Logging Primer.
Features
The
.NET Framework System.Diagnostics, along with the extensions here, provides the following key features:
- Multiple logging sources.
- Output to multiple trace listeners with different filtering.
- Logical operation context and activity correlation.
- Multiple levels of event types including activity tracing.
- Integration with existing .NET Framework tracing (such as WCF).
- Proven architecture.
- Flexible and extensible design.
- High performance.
- No change required to existing .NET Framework trace statements.
The Framework and extensions can be used to write information to any of the following
Listeners:
Log information can be
custom formatted and include context information such as:
- Event id, type, and message
- Source - allows you to partition your logs
- Event time and date
- Thread id, process id and call stack
- Logical operation stack, activity id, and correlation
- Machine name, user name and Windows Identity
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