Thanks everyone for your most helpful comments. I'll read the Richter chapter, the guidelines and all the comments again. Thanks again.
>From: Sam Gentile <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: dotnet discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or > Stategy for Library >Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 07:59:02 -0400 > >Yes, perfect sense. I have always added some kind of intelligent logging >to most of my designs. > >Sam Gentile >Co-Author Wrox Professional Visual C++.NET (ISBN 1861005962 ) > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile >http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/DotNet.htm >BLOG: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/ >http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/ScienceFiction.htm > > > > > >-----Original Message----- >From: dotnet discussion [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of >John Lam >Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 1:11 AM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or >Stategy for Library > >Sorry Sam, I meant to say "diagnostic" where I wrote "debugging". Also, >I wasn't answering your original question; rather I was questioning >Kirk's assertion that the client should do all logging and not the >library. > >If I was diagnosing a problem in the field on some product that used >your library, I would want to be able to rule out your library as the >cause of the observed problem. That would require your library to have >some mechanisms internally that could be used to do a field diagnostic. >Think about Star Trek: when something breaks on the Enterprise, Picard >got them to run a "level one diagnostic on it". > >The best way that I have found for solving these types of problems is to >have some internal tracing / logging functionality inside your library. >Ideally this type of functionality could be enabled by the user on >demand. Even better would be if there would be a nice way to force the >diagnostic to happen, and to have it mail the result of the diagnostic >back to me so that I could examine the results for myself. > >The diagnostics could also do stuff like detect whether your library's >caller is not calling you correctly. This would be the role of custom >exceptions thrown by your library (e.g. you tried to open a database >connection without specifying the connection string). But would throwing >an exception be the right solution in these cases? How would it help you >diagnose the case above? I think that there is a very good use of >logging inside of a library to help diagnose these types of issues in >the field. > >Perhaps an interesting solution would be to have a mechanism whereby you >could switch on the fly from throwing custom exceptions to logging the >result of your custom exceptions so this could aid in diagnosis >(especially remote diagnosis). > >Am I making any sense here? > >-John >http://www.iunknown.com > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Sam Gentile [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 8:54 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or >Stategy for Library > >I don't know what you mean by logging John. Its not about debugging. To >me, it comes down to this: I'm making a library of useful .NET functions >mainly around System.Xml stuff. There are a bunch of things that could >go wrong. I think those things should be caught. I think it would be >really crappy to have the runtime catching those errors and throwing >stack traces. Why is this even debatable? All libraries written to this >point have asserts and all sorts of error checking. I'm trying to ask >about the best way to catch errors and deal with them. > >Sam Gentile >Co-Author Wrox Professional Visual C++.NET (ISBN 1861005962 ) > >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile >http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/DotNet.htm >BLOG: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/ >http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/ScienceFiction.htm > > > > > >-----Original Message----- >From: dotnet discussion [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of >John Lam >Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 8:40 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or >Stategy for Library > >Actually, I'm not sure that I agree that the library should not do *any* >logging. If I want to debug a library in the field, I would want to have >mechanisms whereby I could enable logging in my library (reading a >registry key, presence of an environment variable etc). > >-John >http://www.iunknown.com > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Kirk Jackson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 8:19 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or >Stategy for Library > >Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant by 'handling'. > >Yeah, I agree that the client should do any logging, rather than the >library. > >Kirk > >-----Original Message----- >From: franklin gray [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] >Sent: Wednesday, 29 May 2002 10:14 a.m. >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Re: [DOTNET] Need a good real-world C# Exceptions Resource or >Stategy for Library > > >"With the libraries we create, we try to make the exceptions that a >library client receives meaningful." > >so you create custom exceptions....I bet just like I said below. > >".. so that the client knows that they are catching all meaningful >application exceptions:" > >The client knows of all exception if the catch them like they should and >it should be their responsibility to log them if they feel the need to, >otherwise you are eating up their harddrive space for no reason. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, >or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, >or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, >or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, >or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, >or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. > >You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or >subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com. --------------------- Sam Gentile .NET Consultant Co-author: Wrox Visual C++ .NET: A primer for C++ developers BLOG: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/ http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/DotNet.htm http://www.project-inspiration.com/sgentile/ --------------------------- _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
