Log files rotation with .net listeners

Question

I have an existing .net service, and I want to configure it to write messages to a log file. I added in the following in the service configuration:

<system.diagnostics>
  <sources>
    <source name="My.Service" switchValue="All">
      <listeners>
        <add name="text" type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" initializeData="c:\log.txt" traceOutputOptions="Timestamp"/>
      </listeners>
    </source>
  </sources>
</system.diagnostics>

The problem is that the log file becomes quickly very large, so I was wondering if it's possible to configure some sort of log rotation.
Since the process locks the file for writing, it's not possible to rotate it manually, say with a script periodically renaming the file, at least without stopping and restarting the service.

Thanks for any suggestion.

Answer 1

Could you have the log rotation built into the filename so that:

"c:\log.txt"

becomes:

"c:\logDDMMYYYY.txt"

This way the log automatically rolls over to a new file at the end of the day.

Answer 2

Maybe you may have a look at log4net a free and easy-to-use logging library for .NET. This library already includes log rotating.

Otherwise you'll have your service to "unlock" the file and/or log to a new file automatically.

Answer 3

There is the FileLogTraceListener that I think would do the trick. You can configure it to a daily or weekly interval.

If it's not enough then you will have to write your own tracelistener, just inherit from TraceListener and override the write methods.