Another year is almost over! I’ve looked back through the posts on this blog from the past year and made some notes in case you’re looking for some holiday reading.

This was a huge year for Serilog. January kicked of with a few tens of thousands on the NuGet package download counter, but closing up the year it’s over 250k and accelerating. With Serilog-style message template support set to land in ASP.NET 5, I think it is safe to say 2016 is the year we’ll see structured logging hit mainstream in .NET.

Seq has also seen huge (triple-digit) growth this year, especially since v2 shipped in June. Keeping up has been a challenge! Along with a new major version in the first quarter next year, there’s a lot coming for us in 2016 - stay tuned for some updates after the break.

2015

  • Give your instrumentation some love in 2015! – I started this year aware that the vast majority of .NET teams are still writing plain-text logs, collecting them with Remote Desktop and reading them in Notepad. It feels like this is improving but there’s still a long way to go before we’re all using the current generation of tools effectively.

  • Using Serilog with F# Discriminated Unions – Serilog gained some better F# support this year. (Also on the F# front, Adam Chester’s implementation of Message Templates in F# has opened up some possibilities with that language. Logary 4 also promises some Serilog-style structured goodness for F# users sometime in the coming year.)

  • Tagging log events for effective correlation – Some tips for tracing related paths of execution through your application logs.

  • Diagnostic logging in DNX/ASP.NET 5 – The ASP.NET 5/CoreCLR platform has changed significantly since this first tentative post describing Serilog support went out in May, but the fundamentals are still pretty well summed-up here. ASP.NET 5 and CoreCLR are the bit focus areas for Serilog’s upcoming 2.0 release, which has been ticking away on GitHub for a few months now. The platform reset going on in .NET right now is going to take some getting used to, but in a few years we’ll be able to thank the current ASP.NET and CoreFX teams, as well as the mass of community contributors, for the continued relevance and growth of .NET. 2016’s going to be a year for us all to rally and show some support for this work.

  • Seq/2 Update, Seq/2 Beta and Announcing Seq 2 RTW – It’s hard to believe Seq 2 has only been out since June. These few posts track the release of Seq 2, which was a complete UI rewrite and major overhaul of Seq v1. (2.1 followed, as did 2.2 and 2.3. Seq is now at version 2.4).

  • Filtering with Signals in Seq 2 – Explains the new filtering system in Seq 2.

  • Contender for .NET’s Prettiest Console? – If you’re not using Serilog’s Literate Console sink, you need to check out this post.

  • Contextual logger injection for Autofac – If you prefer to inject ILogger using your IoC container, this post is for you.

  • Assigning event types to Serilog events – Seq’s “event type” system can be implemented in simple flat-file logs too, for improved searching/filtering.

  • Aggregate Queries in Seq Part 1: Goals – The first of a series of posts documenting a spike through Seq v3’s SQL Query interface. (Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.)

  • How to notify Slack using logs from your .NET app – Seq + Slack = <3.

Thanks for visiting and commenting this year. Have a happy and safe holiday season, and see you in 2016!