The Berryware Blog

I’ve been experimenting with a logging library for .NET called NLog.  My past experience has been with Log4Net but I’ve not been all that happy with Log4Net so I was looking for a better alternative.  NLog seems to be that alternative… but I ran into one glitch when I switched from file and console logging to Windows event logging.  I just wasn’t getting anything logged.  The first problem was that I didn’t have an event log source defined, so I used WiX to create an event source (pretty easy to do since I’ve already used WiX for this purpose in the past).  After that I was a bit puzzled- it still wasn’t working and the nlog internal logs weren’t showing anything either.

It was time to dig into the source code… and what I found out seems to be a bug in NLog.  I had a target configured this way:

<target
  name="eventlog"
  xsi:type="EventLog"
  layout="${longdate}|${level}|${message}"
  log="Application"
  source="My Source" />

I didn’t have machineName defined.  After all, the documentation stated that machineName defaults to the local machine anyway, so why set it to anything?  Well… because if you don’t then a boolean member var called _operational stays “false” and it needs to be set to “true” for the event log entry to get written!  So, the workaround for this is actually pretty easy:

<target
  name="eventlog"
  xsi:type="EventLog"
  layout="${longdate}|${level}|${message}"
  log="Application"
  source="My Source"
  machineName="." />

Anyway, I thought someone else may find this useful if they’re also an NLog newbie…