Tip#100: Did you know… How to view ASP.NET trace information?

You can enable ASP.NET tracing either at an Application level or at a page level; see Tip# 77: Did you know… How to enable Page Level Tracing for your ASP.NET pages? for more information.

With the tracing enabled, you can view the trace output in a trace viewer by navigation to trace.axd from the root of your application. For example, if the URL of your application is https://localhost:11423/Website, then the trace viewer can be accessed at https://localhost:11423/WebSite1/trace.axd.

Trace

You can click on the “View Details” link of a requested page to see further information about that specific page.

To write to the trace output, you can add the statment Trace.Write(“This is an action in my page.”) into your code.

The trace request limit and whether the most recent tracing data is kept and shown in the viewer can be specified in the web.config file as follows:

<system.web>
    <trace enabled=”true” mostRecent=”true” pageOutput=”true” requestLimit=”20” />

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer