In the comments to my post of a few days ago on logging with log4net, Alik Levin raised a good question:
“Why would I actually use log4net for ASP.NET 2 (VS2005) instead of the built in
health monitoring?”
I’m sure I must have seen ASP.NET 2.0 Health Monitoring before but it had completely slipped my mind! I followed the link Alik supplied and it does look interesting. Now, I obviously have not used it in a live application, so I’m shooting from the hip, but to answer Alik’s question, the only reasons that spring to mind are to have a coherent logging stragey in place across all application types, and perhaps the number of different ‘appenders’ that are available. Also, the API seems a bit heavy if I have to instantiate a class for every event that is raised. That said, if you are starting out on a new project it’s definitely worth evaluating.