.Net Tracing Article from CoDe Magazine

CoDe Magazine - Instrumenting Applications with .NET Tracing

"Application instrumentation gives you the ability to perform runtime diagnosis of enterprise application state, which is critical to mission success. To help with instrumentation and logging, .NET ships with tracing types in the System.Diagnostics namespace. Using these types, you have the ability to log information to multiple output streams for diagnosis of application runtime behavior. Information produced by instrumentation and tracing types enable you to examine the runtime state of an application and fix problems that would be otherwise expensive and painful to solve.

For many small and medium sized programs, it isn't too difficult to find and fix bugs based on reproducible information from users. As applications increase in size and complexity, the ability to figure out what is causing a bug becomes more difficult. On larger enterprise systems you need a way to track what is happening to find out what is causing problems. You must instrument your application so you can turn on tracing that will reveal pertinent information about your program's behavior. ..."

I've known about .Net tracing for forever, but never really used it. But then again, I hadn't built any major .Net apps. (Ton's of utilities and such but few LOB critical apps...)

Well that's changing and I'm starting to build and roll out a number of major apps, so it's time I revisit tracing and trace listeners...

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