What is the point of using a Logging framework?

Question

I think I might be missing the point of having a logging framework for your application. In all the small apps I've always written a small "Logging" class and just pass log messages to a method in it which is written to a file.

What is the purpose of a 3rd party logging framework like log4net? Is it thread safety with logging write operations or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Depending on how smart your own logging system implementation is.

In java, if you want to inherit log types, etc., it might be too much hassle and you'd prefer a third-party tool like Log4J. I assume there are similar things for C#. Similarly if you want to determine log level from the command line.

If you just want to route all your System.out and control whether they are printed whenever you compile, your own logger would do just fine.