Thanks to Kent, another article of mine has just been published on MSDN:
Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes
This is one of my favorites, as it shows a real life example of something I actually went through early in my .Net days. This article was the result of that experience, and it was pretty darn cool.
Here's the introduction:
"What?! You want me to transform all this into something searchable?" I asked with dismay. It was an early morning meeting with the company's CTO. The topic was, "We've got a bunch of log files from our legacy application, and we need to provide a good way to collect and search data from those logs." The "logs" were a bunch of year-old text files in which our legacy application saved all its logs for a specific task it performed. Now the customer wanted to have some statistics about all the operations that were written in those files.
CTO: "Yeah, and we need it right away. Can you do it?"
"Sure", I replied. I had to think about how to do this, though. Surely, this would be a challenge...."