Tracing and Instrumenting ASP.NET Applications

Tracing enables you to monitor the execution of your application (or web form) as it is running, with a view to peeking at the values of variables or return codes at different times during execution. Unless your code is everything it needs to be the very first time, you're likely to use tracing to debug or fine tune your application. It is beneficial to take advantage of tracing not only in a test environment, but in a production environment as well.

The purpose of this article is to: 1) familiarize you with the capabilities (and some pitfalls) of the individual pieces of tracing in ASP.NET; 2) instruct you on how to create a unified wrapper that stitches together the individual pieces of tracing, to handle both tracing and error logging functionality; and 3) provide high-level guidance that will allow you to take full advantage of tracing in both test/development and production environments.