Dealing with Errors During Development

Of course good .NET programming practices have you nest your code within try/catch blocks, so you can still render pages even if there is some bad code within one of the web parts on the page, however, most articles I have seen reference pushing all errors to the Trace log.

This is all well and good in a production environment, but, in a development environment, I find it useful rather than to write errors to the Trace log, and having to dig through thousands of lines of messages (if you are not throttling events that is) in a text file (or using a third party tool – I’ve seen some on CodePlex), write event log entries to the system event log, and keep that open.

Writing events to the system event log is easy – just do the following in your code.

// we need to include the System.Diagnostics namespace
using System.Diagnostics;

// example try/catch block
try
{
// code here
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    Trace.Write(ex);
    Trace.WriteLine(HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.ToString());
    EventLog.WriteEntry("Project List", ex.ToString(), EventLogEntryType.Warning, 2);
}

The 4 parameters passed above are

Which will write an event, such as the example shown above to the Application event log.

More on the EventLog class can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.eventlog(VS.80).aspx