Question

I was wondering if there is any way that I could leverage the methods on System.Diagnostics.Trace, as a form of commons logging for my .Net libraries. Rather than include dependencies in those libraries for log4net or CommonsNet (which appears to be a similar project to commons logging for java in .Net), can I use the built in methods?

I see that it is possible to add listeners to this trace output, however are there going to be performance penalties for calling Trace.TraceError, Trace.TraceWarning or Trace.TraceInformation from performance critical code?

Answer 1

They are already designed for this purpose so using them for what they were meant to be is perfectly valid. Just add this to your app.config file:

<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>

On the other hand, yes they will affect the performance of your application in performance sensitive area. If you’re so concerned about that, rather use Common.Logging like below:

log.Trace(m=>m("value= {0}", obj.Value));

This way, only if the LogLevel.Trace is enabled this function will be evaluated. When disabled, there will be minimal performance penalty.