• Fabian Wetzel
  • 2012-12-21
  • 1 min. read

WCF Tracing In 3 Steps

If you want to trace WCF to better understand what is going on, you open your app.config or web.config on the service side and add the following xml to it:

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<system.diagnostics>
  <sources>
    <source name="Microsoft.IdentityModel" switchValue="Verbose">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
    <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Verbose" propagateActivity="true">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
    <source name="CardSpace">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
    <source name="System.IO.Log">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
    <source name="System.Runtime.Serialization">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
    <source name="System.IdentityModel">
      <listeners>
        <add name="xml" />
      </listeners>
    </source>
  </sources>
  <sharedListeners>
    <add name="xml" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" initializeData="c:\temp\trace.svclog.xml" />
  </sharedListeners>
  <trace autoflush="true" />
</system.diagnostics>

The next step is to open the Visual Studio command prompt and then you type svctraceviewer

Inside the trace viewer, you open your trace file and I am sure, you will find a good description in an error trace for your problem:

Attention! Do not forget to remove the trace config again, because the trace file gets really huge really fast!

#C# #coding #WCF