The WebEvents in the Health Monitoring Framework in ASP.NET 2.0 emit all kinds of useful information. You can also add your own information to it by overriding FormatCustomEventDetails().

The built-in WebEvent provider call that method which adds the information to a WebEventFormatter. After that they call ToString() on the formatter (see e.g. System.Web.Management.EventLogWebEventProvider.AddBasicDataFields().

The problem is that the WebEventFormatter ctor is internal. That means the built-in providers can access the information, but custom ones can’t.

Is this a bug? Am I missing something? Has anybody managed to get this to work?

I submitted feedback to the Microsoft connect site – but got no response yet. If this affects you too, please vote for this bug.