0 Comments

By using a log4net ConsoleAppender, you can write all log messages in your application to the console. These message will show up in the Microsoft Visual Studio output window. I needed a way to redirect the messages written to the console, so I could verify if the correct messages were send to the console. For this task I redirected the standard console output in my unit test:

 

Code

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using log4net;
using log4net.Config;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;

namespace TestProject1
{
    [TestClass]
    public class UnitTest1
    {
        [TestMethod]
        public void TestMethod1()
        {
            // Save original console output writer.
            TextWriter originalConsole = Console.Out;

            // Configure log4net based on the App.config
            XmlConfigurator.Configure();

            var builder = new StringBuilder();
            using (var writer = new StringWriter(builder))
            {
                // Redirect all Console messages to the StringWriter.
                Console.SetOut(writer);

                // Log a debug message.
                ILog logger = LogManager.GetLogger("Unittest logger");
                logger.Debug("This is a debug message");
            }

            // Get all messages written to the console.
            string consoleOutput = string.Empty;
            using (var reader = new StringReader(builder.ToString()))
            {
                consoleOutput = reader.ReadToEnd();
            }

            // Assert.
            string expected = "This is a debug message" + Environment.NewLine;
            Assert.AreEqual(expected, consoleOutput);

            // Redirect back to original console output.
            Console.SetOut(originalConsole);
        }
    }
}

App.config

 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler,log4net"/>
  </configSections>
  <log4net>
    <appender name="ConsoleAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ConsoleAppender">
      <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
        <conversionPattern value="%message%newline" />
      </layout>
    </appender>
    <root>
      <level value="DEBUG"/>
      <appender-ref ref="ConsoleAppender" />
    </root>
  </log4net>
  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/>
  </startup>
</configuration>

Microsoft Visual Studio

 

image

 

I used NuGet to add a reference to the latest log4net build.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Posts