Logging Application Block

You or may not be aware of a new Application block recently released by the Microsoft patterns and practices team. If you have used or are thinking about using the Enterprise Instrumentation application framework (EIF), then the logging app block will be of immediate interest to you. It is available here.

The logging app block provides some very nice improvements on the EIF as it builds on what EIF already provides. Some of the nice features of the logging application block are:-

• New Event sinks, one of which will now write event information to a SQL database.
• Multiple log levels (None, Always, Error, Warning, Informational and Debug). The lack of this in EIF was a problem (IMHO) but its good to see it has been addressed in the logging block.
• Metering for Web Services. Those who develop web service love to know how and when the WS is being used. While you could always do a custom solution, the logging app block now has support for easily doing this and providing custom metering information.

Request Tracing for web services and Event transformation are also new features of the logging app block, however I wont bore you with the details here. If instrumentation is your thing, then check out the logging application block.