Logging is a crucial part of any application. Logging can be used to track events, identify code issues, security holes, etc. In this blog post, I’ll describe how to add logging to your ASP.NET web application using an open source logging framework called Elmah.

Elmah has been around for a while, it became very popular for its pluggable framework. Elmah can be dynamically added to a running ASP.NET web application, or even all ASP.NET web applications on a machine, without any need for re-compilation or re-deployment.

Another common open source logging framework for .NET is a port of the excellent Apache log4j framework to the Microsoft .NET runtime, log4net. However, in this blog, I’ll focus on how to enable logging for your ASP.NET web application using Elmah.

Install Elmah

Get the latest Elmah version by typing the following into your Package Manager Console.

PM> Install-Package elmah.sqlserver

In this example, I am using the Elmah SQL package that comes with the files and configuration needed to log errors in a SQL table. After running the command above, you’ll see a new directory, App_Readme with two files in it.

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