Windows Service Gotchas

• the current directory is not the location of the executable, it’s System32! But that’s easy to change.
• anything logged to the console will be lost. You can redirect anything you output with System.Diagnostics.Trace. That includes for instance the internal debugging output from log4net (useful when you don’t know why your service is not logging anything).

Quoted from log4net documentation:

 

There are 2 different ways to enable internal debugging in log4net. These are listed below. The preferred method is to specify the log4net.Internal.Debug option in the application's config file.

• Internal debugging can also be enabled by setting a value in the application's configuration file (not the log4net configuration file, unless the log4net config data is embedded in the application's config file). The log4net.Internal.Debug application setting must be set to the value true. For example:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <configuration>
      <appSettings>
          <add key="log4net.Internal.Debug" value="true"/>
      </appSettings>
  </configuration>

  This setting is read immediately on startup an will cause all internal debugging messages to be emitted.

• To enable log4net's internal debug programmatically you need to set the log4net.Util.LogLog.InternalDebugging property to true. Obviously the sooner this is set the more debug will be produced.

Internal debugging messages are written to the console and to the System.Diagnostics.Trace system. If the application does not have a console the messages logged there will be lost. Note that an application can redirect the console stream by setting the System.Console.Out. The Trace system will by default send the message to an attached debugger (where the messages will appear in the output window). If the process does not have a debugger attached then the messages are sent to the system debugger. A utility like DebugView from http://www.sysinternals.com may be used to capture these messages.

As log4net internal debug messages are written to the System.Diagnostics.Trace system it is possible to redirect those messages to a local file. You can define a trace listener by adding the following to your application's .config file:

<configuration>
    ...
    
    <system.diagnostics>
        <trace autoflush="true">
            <listeners>
                <add 
                    name="textWriterTraceListener" 
                    type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" 
                    initializeData="C:\tmp\log4net.txt" />
            </listeners>
        </trace>
    </system.diagnostics>

    ...
</configuration>

Make sure that the process running your application has permission to write to this file.

Your Home Address on the Web

 

I’ve always thought privacy concerns over Facebook were exaggerated -they usually come from your parents who have been publishing their home address and phone number on the white pages for decades anyway. There is much much worse.

The mere act of voting in the UK ends up in having your home address published on the web.

If you registered to vote on the Electoral Roll and ticked the wrong box, the one with the confusing caption, something like “tick here if you don’t want your details to appear in the private listing”, then all your past addresses are on the web, year by year. Yippee!

It’s not just your home address, but also the list of people who lived with you. That must be the most blatant breach of privacy I’ve ever seen. It’s like Facebook for flatmates with privacy settings set to ‘Everyone’.

Look at this. Only the first part of the postcode is available. To get the full info all you have to do is register at 192.com.

Currently Reading or Watching…

• Authentication, authorization and impersonation in WCF: WCF Training Kit (Safari Books Online)
• Herb Sutter: Writing modern C++ code: how C++ has evolved over the years (video from the //build/ event)
• Active, dormant and tombstoned apps: Multithreading in Mango