Know Dot Net Article

Writing to Event Logs

by William Ryan

One thing that many programmers need to do is find out information about application problems after their application has been deployed.  Thanks to the System.Diagnostics.EventLog class, it's a piece of cake to serialize your exceptions and write them to an event log using the EventLog class' WriteEntry method.  You can even write to a log that you create especially for your app.

VB.NET

Imports System.Diagnostics

Try

    File.Open("SomeFileThatsOpenAlready")

Catch ex as System.IO.IOException
    Dim myLog as EventLog = New EventLog()
    myLog.Source = "NameOfMyApplication"
    myLog.WriteEntry(ex.ToString)
    Debug.Assert(False, ex.Message)
End Try

C#

using System.Diagnostics

try{
   File.Open("SomeOpenFile");

}
catch(System.IO.IOException ex){
     EventLog myLog = new EventLog();
     myLog.Source = "NameOfMyApplication";
     myLog.WriteEntry(ex.ToString);
     Debug.Assert(false, ex.Message);
}

You don't have to use your own event log, but it certainly will make it easier to track down.  To use one of the built in ones, System Log|Application Log| Security Log| Directory Log etc, simply use their name for the source.  Then, next time you want to see what just happened, it'll be waiting for you in the computer's Event Viewer