Thor Generator (ThorGen) is a generator for ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) event sources which helps avoid frequent mistakes and saves time.
Microsoft's Event Tracing for Windows is a powerful tracing framework that offers minimal overhead and structured payloads.
The problem with writing event sources is often that you have to work with unsafe code and that if you get anything wrong in your event source it won't write events at all. This behaviour is a feature of ETW, applications shall not be disrupted by faulty event sources, so your event source won't log but it also won't throw exceptions that crash your application.
The other problem with writing event sources is that one has to invest a lot of time into writing repetitive code "just" to have some "logging" in an application. It is not seldom that teams do not want to invest that time and opt for a simpler string based logging solution waiving all the benefits of ETW.
ThorGen wants to solve these problems by generating the necessary event source code and letting developers focus on designing their tracing events around their business logic. ThorGen makes ETW easy to use and fast to implement.
Event sources will be specified by writing interfaces that define the trace events and their payloads (no other DSL needed, no context switch). The event source generator will inspect those interfaces and generate the necessary event source code.
The event source templates can be amended to fit your needs and your aesthetic point of view concerning the generated code.
At the moment, we offer two built-in templates to generate event sources in c#.
We provide a nuget package that will integrate ThorGen with your project rather than relying on an installation. This will make it easy for developers who want to clone, build and get going rather than installing prerequisites.
Install the Thor.Generator nuget package to the projects that contain event source interfaces.
Install-Package Thor.GeneratorWe have a walk through for both scenarious here.
Open a project where you want to add your event sources and add an interface that declares the structure of the event source you want to create. Annotate your event source interface with a EventSourceDefinitionAttribute. You can either use the attribute located in our tracing core or create your own.
using System;
using System.Diagnostics.Tracing;
using ChilliCream.Tracing;
[EventSourceDefinition("MyEventSourceName")]
public interface IMyEventSource
{
[Event(1)]
void SayHello(string message);
}If you are using the msbuild integration of ThorGen just compile your project; otherwise, open a terminal window and switch to your solution location and run the following command.
thorgenOr run thorgen -r if you want ThorGen to search recursively for any solution.
For a more detailed help that shows all the scenarious visit our documentation.
| Platform | Build | Tests | Code Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | |
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The Thor Generator (ThorGen) is licensed under the MIT license.