Failed obtaining configuration for Common.Logging

Question

I'm trying to configure a console application with the following logging assemblies:

• Common.Logging.dll (2.1.0.0)
• Common.Logging.Log4Net1211.dll (2.1.0.0)
• log4net.dll (1.2.11.0)

If the logger gets configured programmatically then everything works fine:

NameValueCollection properties = new NameValueCollection(); properties["showDateTime"] = "true";    
Common.Logging.LogManager.Adapter = new Common.Logging.Simple.ConsoleOutLoggerFactoryAdapter(properties);

But if I try to launch it using the following configuration file, it blows up:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <sectionGroup name="common">
            <section name="logging" type="Common.Logging.ConfigurationSectionHandler, Common.Logging" />
        </sectionGroup>
    </configSections>

    <common>
    <logging>
        <factoryAdapter type="Common.Logging.Log4Net.Log4NetLoggerFactoryAdapter, Common.Logging.Log4Net">
             <arg key="configType" value="FILE-WATCH"/>
            <arg key="configFile" value="~/Log4NET.xml"/>
        </factoryAdapter>
    </logging>
</common>
</configuration>

These are the relevant error messages:

{"Unable to cast object of type 'System.Configuration.DefaultSection' to type 'System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection'."}

{"Failed obtaining configuration for Common.Logging from configuration section 'common/logging'."}

It seems to being unable to parse my configuration file, does anyone know what the correct format should be or is it something else that's wrong? I created my configuration file using the official documentation.

Answer 1

If your log4net is 2.0.6 or above, it may be convenient to use Common.Logging.Log4Net.Universal package.

Answer 2

Although this is an old question, I had this issue a few weeks and none of the current answers seemed to remedy it. It seemed my configuration was correct as I had many other applications using near identical configuration with no issue. After quite a bit of debugging and running through stacktraces, I finally found the issue.

Notice that in IIS, I have the API application hosted under another application. In this case both the CAMP application and the API application under it are both using Common.Logging. Because of this, both web.config files get loaded, Common.Logging reads CAMP's configuration, then it sees that API has configuration and tries to read that as well, sees the Common.Logging section and throws up because it already read that from the CAMP application.

In the end the solution was to move the API out from under the CAMP application in IIS. A bit of an obsucre edge case, but perhaps someone else might face this issue some day.