Wow, you’d think nothing had been happening for the past two months. But that’s not the case at all. There are now 6 different GitHub repositories (perhaps a few too many). November and December were heads-down coding months. But now the product is almost ready for an MVP launch… and that has me thinking about error handling. Specifically, logging.

Originally I decided to look into NLog for .NET logging, a product I’ve never used before. I have experience with the Enterprise Library logging block and with Log4Net, and find them both to be useful but not as… pleasant… as I would like. They don’t have the interface I would prefer. But they work. It turns out NLog has basically the same interface, and the same tedious configuration.

Setting aside the logging provider for a moment, I have been deferring a decision on what to do with the output logs. Write a file? Send e-mail? Save to database? With files and database, I would still want an easy way to view the logs. With e-mail, I would have to configure an e-mail provider and might end up accidentally flooding an inbox.

Long story short, I’ve decided to try out Loggly. The free account will likely be more than sufficient for this application’s needs. The free account doesn’t include e-mail alerts, but I could always configure the logging utility to send e-mail if I find it really necessary.

Loggly has nice integration with Log4Net. Therefore, I’m changing the log provider to Log4net.

Posted with : Tech, General Programming, FlightNode: Citizen Science Bird-Monitoring