Question

I have a rather large program that have some odd behaviour once in a while. After it has been deployed at a customer it’s not possible to do debugging. But it is permissible to use log files, so this is what I have created. Something like this:

TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(@"C:\AS-log.txt", true);
tw.WriteLine("ValidateMetaData");
tw.Close();

3 lines like this has been inserted into the code at many places and do give excellent log information. There are 2 problems with this approach however:

1. The code looks very messy when there are more lines regarding logging than actual code.
2. I would like to be able to switch logging on and off via a configuration file.

Any suggestions to a way of logging that can do this and still be simple?

Answer 1

Maybe you could try Enterprise libraries from Microsoft. It has a logging application block which works quite nice

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648951.aspx