When writing a custom TraceListener how can I force the writeheader, the data/messsage, and the writefooter to be one discreet record? Specifically the custom tracelisteners in question write to a non file based source, such as database or event stream. I need to either have the writeHeader, writefooter base methods in TraceListener be ignored or somehow packaged into a single write event.
Here is a good article on how custom TraceListeners work, which also explains when and wh WriteHeader and WriteFooter are called. The trick to avoiding WriteHeader and WriteFooter is apparently to override the TraceData and/or TraceEvent calls.
There is also some discussion of this issue in this SO thread.
Finally, I would encourage you to take a look at Ukadc.Diagnostics it is a pretty cool library for extending System.Diagnostics and provides, among other features, a nice way to achieve some log4net/NLog-like output formatting. There is a little bit of discussion about this library in this SO thread.
Good luck!