How can I add (simple) tracing in C#? [closed]

Answer 1

DotNetCoders has a starter article on it: http://www.dotnetcoders.com/web/Articles/ShowArticle.aspx?article=50. They talk about how to set up the switches in the configuration file and how to write the code, but it is pretty old (2002).

There's another article on CodeProject: A Treatise on Using Debug and Trace classes, including Exception Handling, but it's the same age.

CodeGuru has another article on custom TraceListeners: Implementing a Custom TraceListener

Answer 2

I followed around five different answers as well as all the blog posts in the previous answers and still had problems. I was trying to add a listener to some existing code that was tracing using the TraceSource.TraceEvent(TraceEventType, Int32, String) method where the TraceSource object was initialised with a string making it a 'named source'.

For me the issue was not creating a valid combination of source and switch elements to target this source. Here is an example that will log to a file called tracelog.txt. For the following code:

TraceSource source = new TraceSource("sourceName");
source.TraceEvent(TraceEventType.Verbose, 1, "Trace message");

I successfully managed to log with the following diagnostics configuration:

<system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
        <source name="sourceName" switchName="switchName">
            <listeners>
                <add
                    name="textWriterTraceListener"
                    type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener"
                    initializeData="tracelog.txt" />
            </listeners>
        </source>
    </sources>

    <switches>
        <add name="switchName" value="Verbose" />
    </switches>
</system.diagnostics>