On most of my projects, I use log4net (a habit I carried over from Java really) to maintain traces and logs. I find it preferable to using the trace mechanism, and it certainly beats Console.Write as a technique. One of the best things about it is that you can configure appenders to write to pretty much anything. The appenders that come bundled with log4net cover most of the stuff you’d actually want to log to – the event logs, console, a database, file system, and so on. However, sometimes you may need something a little more specific.
In my case, I needed to have one of my projects log issues directly into the issue tracking system we use here. Said tracking system exposes a web service to do just that, so I set about writing an appender that would consume this service. I’m not going to go into the details of how to connect to this specific system, but hopefully this short post will illustrate how incredibly easy it is to write a custom appender. Continue reading “Writing a Custom Appender for log4net”