Question

My WPF app uses Log4Net to record messages to the event viewer. This is working great on most machines. However, there are two machines in my office where there are problems. One is a physical Windows 7 machine with 2 GB of ram, the other is a virtual machine running XP, which also has 2 GB of ram.

The problem is that even though the users are logged in using accounts with administrator rights, the system won’t let them create the custom event log that I set up for my application. This is causing my program to die.

I can add error handling on all of the Log calls, but my feeling on this is I shouldn’t. The messages are being logged in the catch handler for another error that already occurred. Just what am I going to do with the error information if it can’t be logged?

In any event, I tried to create the custom event log on the XP virtual machine yesterday and it still wasn’t created. What exactly do I need to do to get the custom event log created on these two machines?

Tony

Answer 1

It turns out that the problem wasn’t in the logging code at all. My program uses WPF for the GUI. It’s start-up sequence does the minimum amount of work on the UI Thread so it can display the UI as soon as possible.

The rest of the initialization is done on a background thread. I knew that an error was occurring, but I couldn’t find the custom error log in the list of logs in the Event Viewer. It turns out that my code didn’t find some data in the database that it needs and was trying to report the error. This is a 2 step process which involves first recording the error to the log and then displaying a custom MessageBox dialog. I was getting a XamlParseException when the program was trying to display this dialog.

To make a long story short, the problem that was crashing the program was the XamlParseException. This was thrown because I was calling the custom MessageBox's Show method on the background thread, not on the UI thread. Because I couldn’t find the custom event source in the event viewer, I couldn’t find the error, so I assumed that the error was a permisions issue.

By the way, I did try to create the event log manually at one point, and yesterday I checked the registry and did find the entry for the custom event source.

There is one other machine here that is having the same problem. I’m sure it’s the same exact issue. I’m adding logic to the error handling to make sure that the custom MessageBox is always called on the UI Thread so the program won’t bomb like that if the same issue recurs.