Microsoft ASP.NET 4 : Diagnostics and Debugging - Application Tracing

To turn on tracing, you need to enable tracing in web.config like so:

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <trace enabled="true"/>
  </system.web>
</configuration>

This simply turns on tracing. You can actually control several aspects of page tracing. For example, you could have tracing available on the host computer only (in case you don't want clients getting to your trace information). You might also want to control the number of responses that are held in memory.

Table 1 shows the possible values that can go in the configuration file to support tracing.

The following exercise demonstrates how application-level tracing works and how to navigate around the results.

Using application-level tracing

1. Enabling Tracing Programmatically

Although much of the time you will enable tracing through the Designer, at times you might find it useful to manage tracing during run time (programmatically). For example, you might have regular clients receive normal content; however, when someone with specific credentials appears, you might want to enable tracing for that individual. You might also decide to modify tracing when a certain parameter comes through the request.

The DebugORama site includes a page named EnableTracing.aspx that illustrates how to control the tracing programmatically. If the user types the correct password, the tracing is turned on. The page also shows how to enable and disable tracing programmatically.

public partial class EnableTracing : System.Web.UI.Page
{
   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
   }
   protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {


      if (this.TextBoxSecretCode.Text == "password")
      {
         this.Trace.IsEnabled = true;
      }
   }
   protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
      this.Trace.IsEnabled = false;
   }
}

2. The TraceFinished Event

The tracing context includes an interesting event named TraceFinished that gives you a last chance opportunity to log the tracing information or deal with it in some other way. The TraceFinished event is raised by the Trace object after all request information is gathered.

To subscribe to the event, simply set up the handler during the Page_Load event. The DebugORama example includes a page named TraceFinished.aspx that shows how the trace information was gathered and written to the debug console using System.Diagnostics.Debug.

public partial class TraceFinished : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
      Trace.TraceFinished +=
         new TraceContextEventHandler(TracingFinished);
    }

    void TracingFinished(object sender, TraceContextEventArgs e)
    {
      foreach (TraceContextRecord traceContextRecord in e.TraceRecords)
      {
         System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(traceContextRecord.Message);
      }
    }
}

3. Piping Other Trace Messages

In the last example, tracing messages were logged manually to the debug console by setting up the TraceFinished event handler in the Trace context. System.Diagnostics.Debug is a standard .NET type that's helpful for managing tracing and debugging information. Since version 2.0, ASP.NET has had the ability to plug in the WebPageTraceListener type so that calls to System.Diagnostics.Trace are also inserted into the ASP.NET trace. Setting it up is simply a matter of inserting a line in web.config (note the writeToDiagnosticsTrace option in Table 1). A case in which this is useful is for logging compiler output. To do this, set the writeToDiagnosticsTrace option to true, and then turn on compiler tracing. Compiler tracing is another setting you can set in web.config, but notice that this lies outside the typical System.web section of web.config.

<system.codedom>
    <compilers>
        <compiler compilerOptions="/d:TRACE" />
    </compilers>
</system.codedom>