Archives

• Jun 11 2007

  Json.NET and Mono

  Following on from the recent post on Json.NET in Monorail, Json.NET is now also going to be used in Mono (no relation). It will form the JSON backend for Mono's upcoming System.Web.Extensions implementation, which is used by ASP.NET AJAX.

  Again I think it is awesome to see Json.NET being used in projects of this size (!!!) and popularity.

• Jun 5 2007

  Enterprise Library Logging vs log4net

  I did a presentation today to the Intergen development team on the Microsoft Enterprise Library. As someone who doesn't have much experience with giving presentations I thought it went really well. I've had a lot of positive feedback from co-workers which is nice as I was sure it was going to be a disaster. (Interesting note: During one of my interviews for Intergen, in a moment of foolishness, I gave public speaking as the answer to "What is your biggest weakness?". Just as a reference to all future potential employers: my real biggest weakness is that I just work too gosh darn hard.)

  One feature of my EntLib presentation that I thought was worthwhile sharing was a comparison of the Enterprise Library Logging Block verse log4net. All the examples I found on the net comparing the two were out of date. They often compared log4net with the logging in EntLib 1.1, which is quite different from EntLib 2.0 & 3.0.

  Here are what I believe are the strengths of each:

  Enterprise Library Logging Application Block

  • More actively developed - The recently released Enterprise Library 3.0 contained a number of new features for logging, including WCF support. The last release for log4net on the other hand was over a year ago.
  • Takes advantage of and supports newer technologies - The 3.0 release included support for WCF.
  • Integrates with other application blocks - The Policy Injection Block and Exception Handling Block both include logging handlers to automatically invoke the Logging Application Block.
  • Very extensible - Pretty much all aspects of the Logging Block can be extended and customized. You can create your own TraceListeners, Filters and Formaters quite easily.
  • Configuration tool - Enterprise Library comes with a great tool for creating and modifying its configuration sections. This takes away a lot of the pain and guess work of configuring the EntLib application blocks.

  log4net

  • Works with .NET 1.0 & 1.1 - The much improved logging of EntLib 2.0 and above is only available if your application is running on .NET 2.0 or greater. log4net however works on all versions of .NET.
  • Simpler install - When using the Enterprise Library there are some services you really should install. This is as simple as running a bat file included with EntLib but it does complicate your deployment process.
  • Slightly faster - log4net was significantly quicker than EntLib 1.1 logging. EntLib 2.0 onwards has improved its performance but log4net remains slightly faster. A benchmark I found while researching my presentation had EntLib taking approximately 5-6 seconds to log 100,000 entries while log4net took about 3 seconds. Does the speed difference matter? Probably not. However log4net net does support...
  • Appender Buffering - Buffering support with some appenders lets log4net queue up log entries and write them in a single go. If you are writing entries to the database then buffering is a good way to improve performance.
  • More platforms - Enterprise Library does not support the .NET Compact Framework while log4net does.

  If you have any other thoughts on the Logging Application Block or log4net I'd love to hear them.