Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Log4Net Active Property Values via Lamdas

Some years ago I wrote a couple of posts on some nasty problems that you could encounter if using log4net contexts in an environment where you didn’t control the thread lifecycle, say ASP.Net. Judging by the amount of coverage it got at the time (and still) I wasn’t the only person caught out by this.

Anyway I was doing something similar recently, not in ASP.Net, but in a Windows Service application with lots of threads. It’s the same kind of problem: there’s some thread-specific context that always exists, which we want to make available to log4net, but putting it in ThreadLocalContext doesn’t really work very well because we’d have to set them up in all our thread-entry methods, which would be everywhere where a callback gets entered – very messy in our (highly asynchronous) application.

Instead I wanted to put something in log4net’s GlobalContext that resolved to the thread’s context value. And actually now we’ve got lamdas and all that nice stuff, I was able to come up with a significantly neater implementation for a general-purpose contextual logging property, which basically answers the original ASP.Net problem too:

 

    /// <summary>

    /// Implements a class that can be used as a global log4net property

    /// to resolve an action to a string at event-fixing-time

    /// </summary>

    /// <remarks>With a suitable lamda expression, you can put this

    /// into your log4net.GlobalContext to resolve at logging time to a variety

    /// of stuff you might want to use in your logging statements.

    /// <example>Using threadId (not thread Name) as a property:<code>

    /// log4net.GlobalContext.Properties["threadId"] =

    /// new Log4NetContextProperty(() => Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId.ToString());

    /// </code></example>

    /// </remarks>

    public class Log4NetContextProperty : IFixingRequired

    {

        private readonly Func<string> _getValue;

 

        public Log4NetContextProperty(Func<string> getValue)

        {

            _getValue = getValue;

        }

 

        public override string ToString()

        {

            return _getValue();

        }

 

        public object GetFixedObject()

        {

            return ToString();

        }

    }

In this case I wanted ‘threadId’ as a logging property (log4net exposes thread name, which is normally fine, but the R# test runner creates woppingly long thread names that basically hide the actual logging message, and I really just wanted the IDs (hence the example above). But you can see how you can basically use this to expose any context data to log4net if you wanted to.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

64 Bit Explained

Look, it’s really not that hard.

Programs are still in the same place, in %ProgramFiles%, unless you need the 32 bit version, which is in %ProgramFiles(x86)%, except on a 32 bit machine, where it’s still %ProgramFiles%.

All those dll’s are still in %SystemRoot%\System32, just now they’re 64 bit. The 32 bit ones, they’re in %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64. You’re with me so far, right? Oh, and the 16 bit ones are still in %SystemRoot%\System – moving them would just be weird.

Registry settings are in HKLM\Software, unless you mean the settings for the 32 bit programs, in which case they’re in HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node.

So the rule is easy: stick to the 64 bit versions of apps, and you’ll be fine. Apps without a 64 bit version are pretty obscure anyway, Office and Visual Studio for example[1]. Oh, and stick to the 32 bit version of Internet Explorer (which is the default) if you want any of your add-ins to work. The ‘default’ shortcut for everything else is the 64 bit version. Having two shortcuts to everything can be a bit confusing, so sometimes (cmd.exe) there’s only the one (64 bit) and you’ll have to find the other yourself (back in SysWOW64, of course). And don’t forget to ‘Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned’ in both your 64 bit and 32 bit PowerShell environments.

Always install 64 bit versions of drivers and stuff, unless there isn’t one (MSDORA, JET), or you need both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions (eg to use SMO / SqlCmd from a 32 bit process like MSBuild). Just don’t do this if the 64 bit installer already installs the 32 bit version for you (like Sql Native Client).

Anything with a ‘32’ is for 64 bit. Anything with a ‘64’ is for 32 bit. Except %ProgramW6432% which is the 64 bit ProgramFiles folder in all cases (well, except on a 32 bit machine). Oh and the .net framework didn’t actually move either, but now it has a Framework64 sibling.

I really don’t understand how people get so worked up over it all.

 

[1] Ok, so there is a 64 bit version of Office 2010, but given the installer pretty much tells you not to install it, it doesn’t count.

Monday, July 19, 2010

P/Invoke Interop Assistant

P/Invoke is like a poke in the eye. Sure the P/Invoke wiki made life a lot more palatable, but it’s at best incomplete, at worst inaccurate, and invariably you’ll find yourself hand-crafting signatures based on Win32 API doco and bringing a production server to its knees because of a stack imbalance.

In my idler moments I’ve often thought that surely parsing the source-of-truth Win32 header files and spitting out P/Invoke signatures couldn’t be that hard. Fortunately for everyone, the Microsoft Interop Team thought so too[1], and released the P/Invoke Interop Assistant to Codeplex. Actually that was about 2 years ago, but I only just noticed, so it’s still exciting for me.

As I understand it this has been made easier because Microsoft have been standardizing their header files and adding some additional metadata [2], which makes it possible to generate accurate signatures (and, presumably, to generate MSDN doco).

Sadly of course, none of this does anything to make any of the underlying API’s any easier to use…

 

[1] Actually if you look on Wikipedia, turn’s out there’s a fair few around.
[2] In retrospect you wonder why managed code took so long to take off as a concept, given how enormously fragile the previous paradigm actually was. SAL’s a great idea, but only highlights how fundamental the problem is.

Popular Posts