Windows Developer Power Tools

3.5 Deciphering WCF Logs with the Service Trace Viewer

You’re working with a Windows Communication Foundation application, and you’d like to monitor what’s going on with message or event traffic back and forth between your service and other endpoints. Sure, you can open up the logfiles, but can you really make effective use of those potentially huge files? Wading through megabytes of XML data isn’t particularly fun, nor is it easy to link together things like message interchanges between client endpoints and your server.

The Service Trace Viewer (STV) can help you sort out all of this. The STV consolidates logfiles and presents you with a timeline of all communications between multiple endpoints, as well as events occurring at each endpoint. A number of features, such as filtering and event graphs, make it very easy for you to understand exactly what’s going on with your WCF applications.

Microsoft Service Trace Viewer at a Glance
Tool	Microsoft Service Trace Viewer
Version covered	3.0.3906.22
Home page	http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/89
Summary	Consolidate and view trace and message logs in one clear UI, and see the exact message and communication flow between WCF components
License type	Microsoft EULA
Online resources	WCF forums, various blogs
Supported Frameworks	.NET 2.0, 3.0
Related tools in this book	Service Configuration Editor

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