Wednesday, October 11, 2006

log4net

Today I've been playing with a logging framework called log4net. It's a port of a java logging framework (log4j would you believe), that's really popular. The nice thing about log4net is that it's really simple to use and configure and comes with a huge range of log sinks (known as 'appenders' in log4net speak) straight out of the box, you can even log to telnet. I think the sign of a good framework is one that lets you get up and running really quickly without having to study the full model, but has the extensibility to allow you to do the more complex stuff if you need to as well as being fully configurable without having to recompile you application and log4net seems to be that kind of framework. I haven't used the logging application block from the P&P group, so I can't compare it to that. For me, moving up from writing directly to a file or the event log is a big move forward.

1 comment:

Frederik Gheysels said...

I'm having a look at the log4net framework as well, but I haven't been able to find an xsd for it that defines the xml configuration for it.
Have you ?