Simplest Logger for .Net?

If you need to supply logging functionality for your application, you most likely use well known logging frameworks such as log4net or the Logging Application Block from Microsoft’s Enterprise Library.

But logging frameworks may be overkill if you just need to trace a couple of output lines while debugging on your development machine, and a simple procedure might be sufficient:

void Log(string s)
{
  System.IO.File.AppendAllText(@"c:\path\to\my.log",
    DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss") + " " +
    s + "\r\n");
}

Whether you implement this procedure as private or as (static) public is up to your use case.

A little extension even supports indentation:

int indent = 0;
void Indent() { indent += 2; }
void Unindent() { indent -= 2; }

void Log(string s)
{
  System.IO.File.AppendAllText(@"c:\path\to\my.log",
    DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss") + " " +
    new string(' ', indent) +
    s + "\r\n");
}

void StartLog(string s)
{
  Log("Start:" + s);
  Indent();
}

void EndLog(string s)
{
  Unindent();
  Log("End:" + s);
}

 

Advertisement