Why does EventRecord.FormatDescription() return null?

Question

When using System.Diagnostics.Eventing.Reader.EventLogQuery to read events from the Windows Event Log, the EventRecord.FormatDescription() method somet

Answer 1

This is due to a bug in the .NET framework.

Basically what you need to do to work around this bug is to set the CurrentCulture to "en-US".

Example:

var beforeCulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

try
{
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");

  using (var session = new EventLogSession(ipOrAddress, userDomain, username, password, SessionAuthentication.Default))
  {
    var query = new EventLogQuery("System", PathType.LogName, queryString)
      {
        ReverseDirection = true,
        Session = session
      };

    using (var reader = new EventLogReader(query))
    {
      for (var record = reader.ReadEvent(); record != null; record = reader.ReadEvent())
      {
        // Read event records
        string message = record.FormatDescription();
      }
    }
  }
}
finally
{
  Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = beforeCulture;
}

This workaround is was very hard to find, so I thought I would document it a place where it will be indexed by Google. I found it in an old MS Connect case, but it has been closed with a status of "wont fix".

UPDATE: The bug has been reported for .NET 4 as well and the status is "Sent to Engineering Team for consideration" and comment alluding that the bug might be fixed in the next major .NET framework release (v5).