Question

I have a .net 3.5 web site that works fine when I run it in Visual Studio. However when we run it in IIS there are some errors. What I would like to do is add some type of logging to the web.config so it logs what is happening to the website into a file. Any good way of doing this? Thanks

Answer 1

If your code outputs log info using the built-in .NET System.Diagnostics.Trace functions, you can control and configure where those traces go using your web.config file.

In your code, use calls like

System.Diagnostics.Trace.TraceInformation("Your log info here");

In your web.config, set up an event log trace listener like this:

<configuration>
  <system.diagnostics>
    <trace autoflush="false" indentsize="4">
      <listeners>
        <add name="myListener" 
          type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" 
          initializeData="TextWriterOutput.log" />
        <remove name="Default" />
      </listeners>
    </trace>
  </system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

This will route the trace output from your program to the text file TextWriterOutput.log

More info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.tracelistener.aspx