I’ve been working on the Discogs.com API Assembly for .NET Applications now for a couple days and have been able to make some progress. It’s now a bit more stable as well a a tiny bit easier to use.

I took some time and added a DEBUG class. This class allows you to find out what’s happening within the Discogs.com Assembly if you start to have issues! This new class has two properties:

• Verbose (bool) – If set to TRUE, Verbose logging will be enabled allowing you to get more precise detail on what is going on within the Assembly. Otherwise, only exceptions will be logged.
• Log (string) – This is a string containing the current debug log.

Also, it has one Method:

• LogEvent (string sEvent) – Logs the value passed in to the debug log. This way you can use the same debug log from your own applications Should help make things a little easier.

New in this version as well is better error handling in the event of 404′s or an Artist/Release isn’t found. Before if you requested something that didn’t exist, the Assembly kinda crapped out while trying to deserialize the (non-existent) XML This has all been fixed.

I’m also including a small example program (with source code) on how to use the Discogs.com API Assembly. I’ve coded the example in C#, so sorry to all those VB.NET developers out there! If one of you guys would like to translate it to VB.NET, I’d be more than happy to post it here as well.

If you do not already have Microsoft Visual Studio installed, no worries! Microsoft provides a free version for C# development called Visual C# Express and you can get it here over at Microsoft.com.

You will need to update the Reference to the Discogs.com API Assembly. It currently points to where I had it setup on my local machine.
Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Cheers!

Discogs.com API Assembly for .NET Applications v1.0 Build 2871 – Download (9k)

Discogs.com API Assembly Example Application (with Source) – Download (10k)

The issue that I ran into was I wanted to log these messages not to the file system, but to the database. Microsoft provides for this in allowing people to create custom Trace Listeners. After some heavy Googling I was able to find this article on MSDN which describes a method in which you would be able to create a custom Trace Listener. Using the code from this article, I was able to boil it down to a simple code shell which anyone could take and use within their WCF application.

This is very helpful for people looking to capture and log the incoming and outgoing SOAP messages to their WCF application without having to create a custom dispatcher. On top of that, creating a Listener provides a drag-and-drop assembly you can use on any future project you might create.

The code for this project can be found here (ZIP, 5.4k). The solution was created using Visual Studio 2005.

Cheers!