Logging with Enterprise Library

  • Article

As noted in the previous Logging blog post, the framework for our platform ended up using Enterprise Library 3.1. Some of the compelling reasons for choosing Enterprise Library over the alternative options were:

  • Breadth of listeners and formatters for free with access to source code
  • Config file driven design allowing you to turn on/turn off logging without changing a line of code
  • Proven and tested components helping you build on top of them with a high sense of reliability

The logging component of our framework provides a simple design-time experience to developers, abstracting away the generic APIs that Enterprise Library provides:

This is essentially a façade to Enterprise Library (currently version 3.1) where implementation of Debug looks similar to:

public static void Debug(string log)

{

try

{

Logger.Write(log, CATEGORY_DEBUG); // CATEGORY_DEBUG is a string for category "Debug"

}

catch (System.Configuration.ConfigurationException configErr)

{

System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(string.Format("Config info missing for Logger. Details: {0}. Exception is: {1}" , GetDebugInfo() , configErr.ToString()));

}

catch (Exception e)

{

System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(string.Format("Error occured while logging the debug statement: {0}:. Exception is: {1}", log,e.ToString()));

}

}

Overloaded methods of Debug, Info, Warn and Error provide the consuming components to pass in context ids, severity for error messages among multiple others.

Consuming .NET applications (exe's, web site, web services, windows services) would:

  1. Reference essentially only the framework assembly (don't need to add all the enterprise library assemblies)
  2. Ensure appdomain's config file (app.config/web.config/.exe.config) has the requisite entries (In my next blogpost I will talk as how we went about automating this for SharePoint Web Applications)

Now all the developer would need to do is use the lightweight Log.Debug("Just log me")and the operations/engineering team can use tail/sql query/DebugView/trace listeners/event viewer/inbox to troubleshoot and/or analyze system issues