Customize Trace Output

Question

I'm using Trace in two of my projects, but I'm seeing different behavior in both:

The first project is a console application that I will convert to a service (at which point I will eliminate the Console traces), and I'm adding two Trace listeners:

Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(someFileStream));
Trace.Listeners.Add(new ConsoleTraceListener());

The project second one is a WinForm application and I have a "ConsoleForm" which displays Trace information and the user can open and close it as they please. For that application I also add a Trace listener:

Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(
    new TextBoxStreamWriter(new WriteToTextBox(OnTextBoxWrite))));

The TextBoxStreamWriter is a custom class I've created that allows me to write to the ConsoleForm's text box. In any case, here is the issue I'm having: the console application does not display any performance traces while the windows application does, here is an example of a performance trace:

API: Performance::OnCPUThread CPU Usage: [0%], Memory Usage: 59mb

I don't care to see the performance information, so I'm perfectly happy with how the console application is handling it, but I can't figure out how to get the same behavior for the windows application. Does anybody know why this is happening and how I can fix it?

Update

I'm not doing anything crazy, actually it's even simple... here is my code:

public partial class ConsoleForm : Form
{
    public delegate void WriteToTextBox(string value);

    public ConsoleForm()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        Trace.AutoFlush = true;
        Trace.Listeners.Add(new TextWriterTraceListener(
            new TextBoxStreamWriter(new WriteToTextBox(OnTextBoxWrite))));
    }

    private void ConsoleForm_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
    }

    private void OnTextBoxWrite(string value)
    {
        if (!this.IsHandleCreated)
            return;

        if (this.InvokeRequired)
        {
            object[] parameters = { value };
            BeginInvoke(new WriteToTextBox(OnTextBoxWrite), parameters);
        }
        else
        {
            // ConsoleBox is a simple multiline text box
            ConsoleBox.AppendText(value);
        }
    }

    private void ConsoleForm_Closing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e)
    {
        Trace.Flush();
        if (e.CloseReason != CloseReason.FormOwnerClosing )
        {
            e.Cancel = true;
            this.Hide();
        }
    }
}

My TextBoxStreamWriter implements the TextWriter interface... the only other difference is that the console app is .Net 4.0 while the GUI app is .Net 3.5, but I doubt that would make a difference. My TextBoxStreamWriter implementation can be found here (pastie).

Answer 1

Just adding a TraceListener won't cause that message to be logged.

Can you provide more details about what your app is doing.

Try testing your TraceListener in a new simple WinForm app, I wouldn't expect you to see those messages. If you do, there is something in your listener implementation..

Answer 2

Thanks to Les, I forced myself to delve a little deeper into the "issue" and realized that a 3rd party DLL was causing the performance logs. There seems to be nothing inherent to C# or the Trace class that would display trace messages from anywhere else but the programmer's code or referenced libraries.