ASP.NET Cookbook

10.1. Uncovering Page-Level Problems

Problem

You want to find the source of a problem that appears to be associated with a particular page of your application, such as a page that completes its operations more slowly than desired.

Solution

Enable page-level tracing for the page in question by setting the Trace attribute of the @ Page directive in the .aspx file to "true" and then using Trace.Write (or Trace.Warn) statements as warranted in your code-behind to write trace information to the trace output.

Example 10-1 through Example 10-3 show the code we’ve written to illustrate this solution. Example 10-1 shows the .aspx file for a typical ASP.NET page. The code-behind class for the page appears in Example 10-2 (VB) and Example 10-3 (C#). By running the page and analyzing the trace sequence, you can see how long certain key operations are taking. The output with the trace sequence is shown in Figure 10-1.

Figure 10-1. :Sample tracing output

Discussion

Tracing tracks and presents the execution details about an HTTP request. The TraceContext class is actually where ASP.NET stores information about an HTTP request and its trace information. You access the TraceContext class through the Page.Trace property of an ASP.NET page. To enable tracing for the page, be sure to set the Trace attribute of the @ Page directive in the .aspx file to "true“, as shown in Example 10-1.

The TraceContext class ...