At the current time my speaking schedule for the rest of the year looks like: Tulsa Tech Fest - October 14th (The day after my birthday) NUnit Extensibility - Creating custom assertions for NUnit Zero Cost .NET - How to use nothing but free tools to create a powerful .NET development environment. Dallas .NET User Group - December 14th Black Belt XML - XmlReader, XmlNamespaceManager, Namespaces, and why it all matters. I'm beginning to put together my schedule for 2007. If you would like to have me speak at your user group, then drop me a line and let me know.
I've been having conversations with several people working with BizTalk in the DFW area recently and we are trying to guage interest in the forming of a BizTalk User Group. To start with we would probably begin as a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Dallas .NET User Group. I've had preliminary conversations with their President and he is amiable to the idea. What I need to know is who out there would like to be a member of such an organization? If you are interested, drop me an email using the contact link on my blog and let me know or leave a comment here.
I was recently introduced to log4net by Ed Kisinger of EdSquared.com and absolutely love the project. I've previously used to Logging Application Block inside Enterprise Manager for my logging, and would again if I was using the rest of EntLib, but log4net fills the wonderful point where you may not want to take on all of EntLib and still have excellent logging.log4net abstracts the actually logging on messages from the location that a log will be stored. As such it is easy to change from file logging, to UDP network logging to Database logging, all without touching the code which actually logs. Fantastic idea! The Appender model, as they call this, includes many excellent Appenders right out of the box.In particular, I wanted to use to AdoNetAppender to log my messages to a database. Easy enough, the simple example included in the AdoNetAppender documentation logs the most basic of information. But as you dig deeper into what information log4net can store, you begin to realize how oversimplified this structure really is.It would be a reasonable thing to say that I can sometimes be a bit of a perfectionist. As such I spent this morning creating a database structure capable of holding all of the log4net information, properly normalized to the third normal form. If you would like to be able to store any information available from log4net when logging to a database, then feel free to take this structure and adapt it to your needs.The only personalized piece of this database at the moment is the inclusion of a column for storing a property called InstanceId. As I work with BizTalk on a regular basis, and love Scott Colestock's BizTalk Deployment Framework, I included a column for the Orchestration instance id which his Serializable log4net extension includes.Download Version 1.0 of log4net Database
