AppFabric DataCacheServerLogManager Hates Your Trace.WriteLines

I like to fill my test code with TONS of logging. I log damn near everything because I hate it when the team has to waste time answering, “Can you get me a repro?” when we can just peruse the logs to see what went wrong. I also like to watch the traces get logged in real time using DebugView as my tests execute. So after I made some recent changes in my code to programmatically manage our AppFabric cache, I was super bummed to see my real time logging completely disappear.

The following code shows a snippet of what my test code is doing to repro the issue:

	InitialSessionState state = InitialSessionState.CreateDefault();
	state.ImportPSModule(new string[] { "DistributedCacheAdministration", "DistributedCacheConfiguration" });
	state.ThrowOnRunspaceOpenError = true;
	using(Runspace rs = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(state))
	{
	rs.Open();
	using(Pipeline pipeline = rs.CreatePipeline())
	{
	Command command = new Command("Use–CacheCluster");
	command.Parameters.Add(new CommandParameter("Provider", "System.Data.SqlClient"));
	command.Parameters.Add(new CommandParameter("ConnectionString", "Data Source=.\\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=AppFabric;Integrated Security=True"));
	pipeline.Commands.Add(command);
	Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("Invoking: {0} {1}",
	command.CommandText,
	string.Join(" ", command.Parameters.Select(p => string.Format("-{0} \"{1}\"", p.Name, p.Value)))));
	pipeline.Invoke();
	}
	Trace.WriteLine("I expect to see this line and all other traces after this.");
	}
	Trace.WriteLine("Ending program");

view raw

AppFabricHatesTracing.cs

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The traces simply no longer get output to the default trace listener. Sure, if I setup a text file listener in my app.config, the traces are properly logged to the file. But what fun is that? I need this stuff in real time now, not after my 100 or so tests run.

So I posed this question to @drub0y, Mimeo’s Chief Software Architect. Sure enough minutes later he responded with:

Well damn. JustDecompile to the rescue. Let’s see how we could have done this ourselves.

1. Fire up JustDecompile, and then load %PROGRAMFILES%\AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server\Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Core.dll to the assembly list.
2. Click on the Search button
3. Go to the Full Text tab and enter: “Listeners”

You should then get a single hit:

And sure enough, when you double click on that, you get the code that @drub0y sent me in the mail above.

The fix? Easy. I just had to add a simple Trace.Listeners.Add(“DefaultTraceListener”) in my code after invoking the powershell pipeline.