Production and Develop Time logging. EIF vs log4net and more....

I'm not a big fan of printf debugging no matter what platform your working on, I'm currently working for a company that's doing the biggest .net project in israel for one of the banks here. it's a n-tier web application involving all sorts of .net stuff (remoting com+ and so), we've got really almost everything + lot's of code( offcourse no bugs r involved ;)). we know it's going to be tough handling production time problems so we need a good logging framework.

on my last presentation on TechEd israel I started to talk about trace listener and the importance of production time debugging. it seems the .net ramework lacks some things to make life easier and more powerful in production environment. everybody needs it and almost everybody built some sort of logging class, maybe using the System.Diagnostics.Trace class or the log4net suite which is nice.

I guess MS noticed the problem and in vs.net 2003 you get Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (aka EIF), I thought to myself "great let's have it", it's nice to be able to dispatch you trace everywhere and be able to configure it easy.

" The overall idea of EIF is to define event sources, which post events from any tier of an application, and event sinks, which can receive events. EIF's own instrumentation API works as a routing layer between sources and sinks, and is controlled by XML configuration files. Those files themselves can be modified by scripting code, creating a convenient way for testers or administrators to manage the details of event logging. If your application begins to fail, for example, you can start capturing detailed information (to a Windows event log, a trace log, or a WMI listener) simply by running a configuration script and without recompiling or stopping any tier of your application. Of course, you have to build in the event sources when you create the application"

searching msdn got me no where (espcially now at 22:00 at work) , google got me mainly MS marketing saying vs.net 2003 has EIF , but they didn't post ant link to it.

finally I found something worth reading from Mike Gunderloy (who has some nice topics in his blog), I found it to be almost The only article on EIF there is.

also you can check a comparison of EIF vs log4net...

it looks cool ,I'm diving in......more to come soon.