How do I use a date pattern in a header/footer?

Question

Here\'s my appender configuration from my app.config. This just prints out the literal string instead of translating it to the date (i.e., it literally prints \"[START: %d

Answer 1

Building on @Wizou's comment. See the DynamicPatternLayout Class documentation.

I'm actually using this difference in behaviour to have a start and end time

One important difference between PatternLayout and DynamicPatternLayout is the treatment of the Header and Footer parameters in the configuration. The Header and Footer parameters for DynamicPatternLayout must be syntactically in the form of a PatternString, but should not be marked as type log4net.Util.PatternString. Doing so causes the pattern to be statically converted at configuration time and causes DynamicPatternLayout to perform the same as PatternLayout.

Setting the type on Header to PatternString but leaving Footer as dynamic