---
title: "New MSDN article: Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/10/new-msdn-article-turn-your-log-files-into-searchable-data-us.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/10/new-msdn-article-turn-your-log-files-into-searchable-data-us.html"
published: "2004-01-10T13:32:00"
updated: "2004-01-10T13:32:00"
tags: [".Net Original", "Cool Articles"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "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…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# New MSDN article: Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes

By Roy Osherove January 10, 2004 In [.Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original), [Cool Articles](https://osherove.com/blog/category/cool-articles)

**Historical article** · Originally published January 10, 2004; technical details may be outdated.

Thanks to [Kent](http://weblogs.asp.net/ksharkey/archive/2004/01/09/49316.aspx), another article of mine has just been published on MSDN:

[Turn Your Log Files into Searchable Data Using Regex and the XML Classes](http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/regexandxmlclasses.asp)

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...."_

## More in .Net Original

[All posts in .Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original)

- Jan 16, 2004

    ### [Three free recipes from "ADO.NET Cookbook"](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/16/three-free-recipes-from-quotadonet-cookbookquot.html)

- Jan 10, 2004

    ### [Service announcement: Source code for MSDN articles now available](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/10/service-announcement-source-code-for-msdn-articles-now-avail.html)

- Jan 9, 2004

    ### [IntelliJ IDEA blows my mind again](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/9/intellij-idea-blows-my-mind-again.html)

- Jan 9, 2004

    ### [Debugging Unit tests using the VS.net debugger](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/1/9/debugging-unit-tests-using-the-vsnet-debugger.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/