C# Cookbook

6.7. Using One or More Event Logs in Your Application

Problem

You need to add the ability for your application to read and write one or more event logs of specific events that occur in your application, such as startup, shutdown, critical errors, and even security breaches. Along with reading and writing to a log, you need the ability to create, clear, close, and remove logs from the event log.

Your application might need to keep track of several logs at one time. For example, your application might use a custom log to track specific events as they occur in your application, such as startup and shutdown. To supplement the custom log, your application could make use of the Security log already built into the event log system to read/write security events that occur in your application.

Support for multiple logs comes in handy when one log needs to be created and maintained on the local computer, and another duplicate log needs to be created and maintained on a remote machine. (This remote machine might contain logs of all running instances of your application on each user’s machine. An administrator could use these logs to quickly find any problems that occur or discover if security is breached in your application. In fact, an application could be run in the background on the remote administrative machine that watches for specific log entries to be written to this log from any user’s machine. Recipe 6.10 uses an event mechanism to watch for entries written to an event log and could ...