Fusion Log Viewer to the rescue

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I know this is not the kind of image you have right now in your mind after reading the post title. Seems like the Chicken Fight in Family Guy that has got nothing to do with the on going plot Smile. But let me belabour! The other day one of my colleagues came at my desk with a possible logging issue in his application. The application was logging just fine until the day before. The application was using log4net for logging its stuff. There were no logs being generated whatsoever. Inarguably the place to look for was anything goofy in the configurations. Nope, things were all ok there. The folders used for logging had proper accessibility for his username. I asked him whether there was any recent change done like an upgrade that might have anything to do with this. Bingo, there was a recent patch release done to fix few important bugs due to which the version numbers of the assemblies were upgraded.

Equipped with that piece of information, and a boat load of anxiety I popped opened the Fusion Log Viewer (fuslogvw.exe) in Visual Studio command prompt. I enabled the logging for binding failures and started the application. Skadooosh!!!! I saw one assembly bind failure log shining right in my face. My colleague looked at it, and gave a smile that a developer gives when he “gets it”. It happened so that the assembly redirect configuration in app.config for one of the assemblies was incorrectly put and hence this wrong behaviour. I don’t know about you, but Fusion Log Viewer did save our day, and it reminded me of one of my childhood favourite characters, Captain Planet (for those who have no clue what is the flying guy all about).

Abhang Rane