Logging, part 1. Introduction

In the next posts I’m going to describe how logging in DataObjects.Net is designed, how it works and how to configure and use it in most effective way. In the meantime, I’m writing exactly the same chapter in the manual, so this work will be paralleled, although I suppose that the blog version will be a bit more informal than manual’s one.

Let’s start then.

In general, logging is the feature most of software engineers use to track how the system works and analyze when it starts to behave in improper manner. It goes without saying that logging capabilities are essential for any product designed primarily for developers and software companies. But having decided that your framework must use some kind of logging, you immediately face up to another challenge: which logging system to use as there are plenty of them (log4net, NLog, etc.). Moreover, you might want to invent your own super-duper logging system.

This choice is rather simple for small products or libraries: they just use one of the most famous and simple in usage, i.e. log4net, or writes everything to some place that can be set up somewhere in configuration file, i.e. "C:\Debug\". But is this straightforward approach good enough for their customers that use these small standalone components to build something more complex and non-trivial?

In such cases the right word is "Transparent integration", it really matters how your small library can be integrated into large system, is its logging subsystem flexible enough to be easily integrated with logging framework that is used there? These are the questions DataObjects.Net development team was thinking about when logging subsystem was about to be implemented.

To be continued…

BTW, we are going to publish the updated localization sample with the generalized LINQ pre-processor that is used to automatically and transparently join localizable & localization entities and substitute calls to localizable properties soon. Stay tuned!