All Your .base

I encountered some issues with a .NET service installer embedded into an .MSI package today. If you have classes dependent upon service startup in your installer and the service fails to start you will often get some unexpected and often cryptic messages. It gets even worse if your messages are relating to event log messages that wont write because of permissions or other similar issues. One gotcha I am guilty of was using EventLog instead of base.EventLog. I also failed to set the event log location when calling the static version of the method calls. By using base.EventLog the ServiceBase class creates an event log source and applies all messages to the Application log. Do this and all event log messages are not belong to us.