In one of the project where I was working one, we used the Microsoft Enterprise Library Exception Application Block integration with WCF for logging all the technical issues on the services/backend in Windows Event Log. This application block worked like a charm, all the errors were correctly logged on the Event Log without even needing to modify the service code. However, we also needed to provide a quick way to expose all those events to the different system users so they could get access to all the them remotely. In just a couple of minutes I came up with a simple solution based on ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET data services is very powerful in this sense, you only need to provide a IQueryable implementation, and that’s all. You get a RESTful service with rich query support for free.

In this sample, I used Linq to Objects to get the latest entries from the Event Log, and I also filter the entries by the category used by the Application Block to avoid loading unnecessary entries in memory.

public class LogDataSource
    {
        string source;

        public LogDataSource(string source)
        {
            this.source = source;
        }

        public LogDataSource()
        {
        }

        public IQueryable<LogEntry> LogEntries
        {
            get { return GetEntries().AsQueryable().OrderBy(e => e.TimeGenerated); }
        }

        private IEnumerable<LogEntry> GetEntries()
        {
            var applicationLog = System.Diagnostics.EventLog.GetEventLogs().Where(e => e.Log == "Application")
                .FirstOrDefault();

            var entries = new List<LogEntry>();

            if (applicationLog != null)
            {
                foreach (EventLogEntry entry in applicationLog.Entries)
                {
                    if (source == null || entry.Source.Equals(source, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                    {
                        entries.Add(new LogEntry
                        {
                            Category = entry.Category,
                            EventID = entry.InstanceId,
                            Message = entry.Message,
                            TimeGenerated = entry.TimeGenerated,
                            Source = entry.Source,
                        });
                    }
                }
            }

            return entries.OrderByDescending(e => e.TimeGenerated)
                        .Take(200);
        }
    }

LogEntry is class I created for this service to expose an Event Log Entry.

    [EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Source",
        SyndicationItemProperty.Title,
        SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true)]
    [EntityPropertyMapping("Message",
        SyndicationItemProperty.Summary,
        SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true)]
    [EntityPropertyMapping("TimeGenerated",
        SyndicationItemProperty.Updated,
        SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true)]
    [DataServiceKey("EventID")]
    public class LogEntry
    {
        public long EventID
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        public string Category
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        public string Message
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        public DateTime TimeGenerated
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        public string Source
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

    }

As you can see, I used the new feature “Friendly feeds” to map several properties in the entries with standard ATOM elements. The “DataServiceKey” is only necessary because I am using the Reflection Provider (the exposed IQueryable implementation is just Linq to Objects) rather than the default Entity Framework Provider.

The data service implementation is also quite simple, just a couple of lines were needed to expose the data source created previously.

public class LogDataService : DataService<LogDataSource>
    {
        public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config)
        {
            config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead);
        }

        protected override LogDataSource CreateDataSource()
        {
            string source = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["EventLogSource"];
            if (source == null)
            {
                throw new ApplicationException("The EventLogSource appsetting is missing in the configuration file");
            }

            return new LogDataSource(source);
        }
    }

With this implementation in place, the final users not only get a feed with all the latest errors in the event log, but also support for performing queries against that data. This is one of the great things about ADO.NET Data services.

In one of the project where I was working one, we used the Microsoft Enterprise Library Exception Application Block integration with WCF for logging all the technical issues on the services/backend in Windows Event Log. This application block worked like a charm, all the errors were correctly logged on the Event Log without even needing to modify the service code. However, we also needed to provide a quick way to expose all those events to the different system users so they could get access to all...

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