Logging Events in a Windows Service Program

I have created a Windows service program and I want my error to strictly be written to the Windows eventLog. So I followed these steps from code project article:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/simplewindowsservice.aspx

But I don't see any of the custom log messages I wrote in the event logs created in the event viewer window when I start or stop the service. Also how do I specify whether the message was due to an error or is just info?

First, MSDN is your friend. Make sure you check out the link, as there are some potential gotchas worth knowing.

Essentially, you create an EventLog object:

this.ServiceName = "MyService";
this.EventLog = new System.Diagnostics.EventLog();
this.EventLog.Source = this.ServiceName;
this.EventLog.Log = "Application";

You also need to create a source, if the above source doesn't exist:

((ISupportInitialize)(this.EventLog)).BeginInit();
if (!EventLog.SourceExists(this.EventLog.Source))
{
    EventLog.CreateEventSource(this.EventLog.Source, this.EventLog.Log);
}
((ISupportInitialize)(this.EventLog)).EndInit();

and then simply use it:

this.EventLog.WriteEntry("My Eventlog message.", EventLogEntryType.Information);

it's actually pretty simple.

I finally got this to work by combining various StackOverflow answers and from MSDN.

First include the following namespaces

using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Diagnostics;

Then setup logging in your constructor

    public UserService1() 
    {
        //Setup Service
        this.ServiceName = "MyService2";
        this.CanStop = true;
        this.CanPauseAndContinue = true;

        //Setup logging
        this.AutoLog = false;

        ((ISupportInitialize) this.EventLog).BeginInit();
        if (!EventLog.SourceExists(this.ServiceName))
        {
            EventLog.CreateEventSource(this.ServiceName, "Application");
        }
        ((ISupportInitialize) this.EventLog).EndInit();

        this.EventLog.Source = this.ServiceName;
        this.EventLog.Log = "Application";
    }

Use as follows:

    protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
    {
        base.OnStart(args);

        this.EventLog.WriteEntry("In OnStart");
    }