Logging during development and runtime

Once you believe that all the bugs have been removed from your code, you would then compile a release version and deploy the application, so that people can use it. But no code is ever bug free, and during runtime unexpected errors can occur.

End users are notoriously bad at remembering, admitting to, and then accurately describing what they were doing when an error occurred, so you should not rely on them accurately providing useful information to reproduce the problem in order to understand what caused the problem and then fix it.

Good Practice: Add code throughout your application to log what is happening, and especially when exceptions occur, so that you can review the logs and use them to trace the issue and fix the problem.

There are two types that can be used to add simple logging to your code: Debug and Trace.

Before we delve into them in more detail, let's look at a quick overview of each one:

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