code-u-like

Elmah is great. Its an error logging utility that you can drop into a .net app without changing any code . You just drop the DLL in the bin folder, and make a few web.config changes. OK, these days you can achieve the same thing with ASP.NET Health Monitoring , but Elmah is nice and easy, and the web pages it provides to inspect the error log are cool. There are loads of different ways of configuring Elmah (you can get it email errors to you, for example) and the 'demo' that comes with the download shows most of the options. But in most cases you'll want bog-standard logging to a local db, so these notes cover doing that. 1. Download Elmah Download from here. 2. Drop DLLs into Bin folder Unpack the download and look for the appropriate bin folder, usually you'll want the Release version of .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.5. From that bin folder, copy the Elmah.dll and the SQLLite.dll to the Bin folder for your web app. E.g, these two files: ELMAH-1.1-bin\bin\net-2.0\Re

Log4net has lots of options and different ways it could be configured - these are notes written to myself so that I can get it working quickly. 1. Download log4net Download from here. 2. Drop DLL in Bin folder In the download package, there are various DLLs, usually you'll want the .net 2.0 release version at: incubating-log4net-1.2.10\log4net-1.2.10\bin\net\2.0\release If you have an ASP.NET Web Application Project (as opposed to an ASP.NET Web Site ) then you'll also need to add a reference to the DLL. 3. Add a Configurator line in the Global.asax There are various ways of telling Log4net to pick up its config. We're going to use the Xml Configurator that pulls config from a separate config file. Add this line of code to Application_Start in the Global.asax: void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); } 4. Add an AppSetting to the web.config The XmlConfigurator.Configure() call above, tells Log