That’s a real pain, but it fixed me…

The thing that made this blogworthy was the lack of error messages. That was the astounding thing. I’d expect some error message on install or something that would prompt me that I needed to install something else. Oh well. I guess that we can’t have everything. It’s a fabulous environment to develop in and is light years ahead of previous development environments so I’m grateful for that but it just points out this type of little inconstancy that much more.

There are a couple of minor differences that you should be aware of if you are interested in using log4net on the Compact Framework. First of all, not all of the appenders make sense – like the RemotingAppender, the EventLogAppender and the OracleAppender. Secondly, there is no mechanism for retrieving assembly level attributes so you have to explicitly initialize and shut down the log4net engine.

static void Main()

{

      try

      {

            //This line configures the log4net engine.

log4net.Config.DOMConfigurator.Configure(

new FileInfo(@”\log4net.config”));

            frmLogin loginForm = new frmLogin ();

            loginForm.ShowDialog();

                  Application.Run(new frmMain());

            }

      }

      catch (System.Exception e)

      {

            _log.Error(“Main“, e);

      }

      finally

      {

            //This line shuts down the log4net engine

            log4net.LogManager.Shutdown();

      }

}

The other thing that was interesting is that the online help on http://logging.apache.org/log4net showed conversion patterns with %message%newline to print the message and then put a newline in the file. I had to use %m%n because the first one there printed as

My stringessage

ewline

which was not quite what was expected.

Have fun with log4net, it’s a great lightweight logging framework for the compact framework.