read event log detail in vb.net - vb.net

Question

I'm writing a application at the moment, part of it will be scraping some information from the windows event log, it mostly works....
Dim strValue As String
Dim objLogs() As EventLog
Dim Logname As String = "Application"
Dim objEntry As EventLogEntry
Dim objLogEntry As EventLogEntry
Dim objLog As EventLog
objLogs = EventLog.GetEventLogs()
For Each objLog In objLogs
If objLog.LogDisplayName = Logname Then
For Each objLogEntry In objLog.Entries
WriteLine("EventID")
WriteLine("Machinename")
WriteLine("message")
Next
Exit For
End If
Next
This will happily write out the EventID, machine name and event message.
details tab in event viewer
What I can't figure out is how to output the "details" tab in event viewer ideal into strings or similar.
MSDN isn't being helpful, could anyone point me in the right direction please?
Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

Looks like the details in the EventLogEntry is represented by the Data property that is stored as a byte array. You would have you would have to then converted to something readable. But the format of the data seems to vary on the Windows OS version.
Here an alternative way to do it. Code copied from answer to from the following question and converted to VB.Net.
Serializing a .NET EventLogEntry instance to XML
Imports System.Diagnostics.Eventing.Reader
Sub Main()
Dim query As New EventLogQuery("System", PathType.LogName)
Dim watcher As New EventLogWatcher(query)
AddHandler watcher.EventRecordWritten, AddressOf watcher_EventRecordWritten
watcher.Enabled = True
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub
Public Sub watcher_EventRecordWritten(sender As Object, e As EventRecordWrittenEventArgs)
Console.WriteLine(e.EventRecord.ToXml())
End Sub
Put in the main module of a simple console application and an watches for system events. Writing out the event data converted to XML as one long string.
Worked using 4.5 framework on a Windows 7 machine.