Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 6. .NET 2.0 Platform Services

In earlier chapters, you learned about the most profound changes in .NET 2.0, including new features in Windows Forms, ASP.NET web applications, and ADO.NET data access. These changes are impressive, but they're only part of the story. In fact, Microsoft developers have been hard at work tweaking and fine-tuning the entire .NET class library. If you look around, you'll find new members, types, and namespaces cropping up everywhere.

Easily Log Events

When something goes wrong in your application, the user is rarely in a position to fix the problem. Instead of showing a detailed message box, it's much more important to make sure all the details are recorded somewhere permanent, so you can examine them later to try to diagnose the problem. In previous versions of .NET, logging was straightforward but tedious. In VB 2005, life becomes much easier thanks to the My.Application.Log object.

How do I do that?

You can use the new My.Application.Log object to quickly write to an XML file, an ordinary text file, or the Windows event log.

To write a log message with My.Application.Log, you simply need to use the WriteEntry( ) method. You supply a string message as the first parameter, and (optionally) two more parameters. The second parameter is the event type, which indicates whether the message represents information, a warning, an error, and so on. The third parameter is an exception object, the details of which will also be copied into the log entry. ...