Examining WCF Diagnostic Traces Using Service Trace Viewer Tool (SvcTraceViewer.exe)

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Service Trace Viewer Tool (SvcTraceViewer.exe) tool comes with Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components. It allows to view WCF diagnostics traces in very convenient way. "Using Service Trace Viewer for Viewing Correlated Traces and Troubleshooting" article explains how.

Specifically I used it for two scenarios

  • Troubleshooting when implementing Message Security with a Windows Client without Credential Negotiation. Using SvcTraceViewer.exe I spotted the following error message: "The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time ('9/19/2007 5:43:39 PM') is in the future. Current time is '9/19/2007 8:43:42 AM' and allowed clock skew is '00:05:00'." I immediately understood that machines clocks are out of sync - which is super important for Kerberos to work properly.
  • Examining message sizes with different protection mechanisms and levels. I needed to understand the impact of data protection mechanisms on general performance. See How Message and Transport Security compare.

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