Today I officially released D7 v4.5
New Features:
- Inside D7’s internal event viewer, you now have the ability to:
- Write your own messages to the application event log.
- CLEAR the event logs, and optionally have then backed up.
- Backups of the event logs are created as %systemroot%%eventlogname%.evt
- Backups may be opened and viewed with the Windows’ Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc), they are not plain text.
- The option to CLEAR the event logs is also present on the Maintenance tab now. This option will clear the Application, Internet Explorer, Security, and System event logs.
- D7’s internal event log viewer now has some color coding in events, and BOLDs any disk related event.
- D7 now writes a few events to the application event log, specifically it writes on startup, shutdown, when starting/stopping/completing D7 Auto routines, and after it clears the event logs.
But what is this FoolishEventLogMsgHelper.dll I’m not seeing in %systemroot%system32?
- This DLL is a tiny 24kb file with one real line of code, that merely assists in displaying custom D7 events in the Windows Event Logs.
- The DLL file is placed there if it doesn’t exist, when D7 writes to the event log.
- The DLL file is not a required file to display messages in the NT event logs, however it is a “help” to do so. Without this DLL, any event written by D7 will have a big paragraph of missing DLL error text in the event description, prior to the actual event text you want to see.
- You will have seen this same error text before with other applications.
- It is because for ANY application that writes to the event logs, Windows must have a reference to that program for the Event ID number and optionally the matching event description text.
- When an application is removed / uninstalled, you would see the error text before or in place of the actual event description.
- The DLL file is REMOVED from the system by default when D7 shuts down (by clicking one of the CLOSE buttons only!!!)
- The DLL file cannot be removed if the Windows Event Viewer console is open, as the file will be in use by the Event Viewer.
- The DLL can optionally be left on the system (D7 Config > Shutdown Behavior) if you always want it’s events to be displayed cleanly without the error text in the event viewer; however by default, I assume you want the DLL removed, so it is configured to do so.
So basically, the DLL makes the messages pretty and easy to read without the error text. That’s all.
It’s harmless if left on the system, but as mentioned by default it should be removed during proper shutdown, unless you would rather it stay on the system, for example if you wrote your own custom events to the log you may want it to stay, in which case you can easily configure D7 to leave it.
