Question

I’m trying to get log4net working for a Windows service. It works fine for a console application.

I’ve created a blank service and the only thing it should do is write out a log statement to a file.

This is my main method.

log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure();
log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(Program));

log.Info("Test");

ServiceBase[] ServicesToRun;
ServicesToRun = new ServiceBase[]
{
    new Service1() 
};
ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun);

This is my app.config file:

<configuration>
<configSections>
  <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net"/>
</configSections>

<log4net>
  <appender name="RollingFileAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">
    <file value="Test.log" />
    <appendToFile value="true" />
    <rollingStyle value="Size" />
    <maxSizeRollBackups value="10" />
    <maximumFileSize value="1MB" />
    <staticLogFileName value="true" />
    <layout type="log4net.Layout.SimpleLayout" />
  </appender>

  <root>
    <level value="ALL" />
    <appender-ref ref="RollingFileAppender" />
  </root>
</log4net>
</configuration>

I’ve also added this line to my AssemblyInfo.cs file:

[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(Watch = true)]

According to everything I’ve read online, this should be enough to create the log file in the directory where the service installed from. When this didn’t happen, I tried putting absolute directories as

log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(new FileInfo("C:\\Users\\Public\\app.config"));

and

<file value="C:\Users\Public\Test.log" />

This didn’t work either. I thought maybe it was some crazy permissions problem since the service runs under a potentially restricted account, but I’ve just tried running it as an administrator and the file still isn’t created.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

This turned out to be a dependency issue with my setup project. The installer wasn’t installing the updated project each time, so the changes were being applied, but not installed.