Setting WCF diagnostics quickly « Flipping a random bit

14Feb/130

Setting WCF diagnostics quickly

There are fair amount of questions on SO where diagnosing problems with WCF is nonstarter because we need lot more information about the problem. To gather some details for the reason WCF is not functioning correctly on the server or the client you can turn on WCF diagnostics on your service to get more details about exceptions.

To get you going quickly - in your web (or app) config:

1) Add System.Diagnostics section anywhere under configuration element. You can replace path with which ever path you want the files to be stored at.

<system.diagnostics>
    <sources>
      <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging" switchValue="Warning, ActivityTracing">
        <listeners>
          <add type="System.Diagnostics.DefaultTraceListener" name="Default">
            <filter type="" />
          </add>
          <add name="ServiceModelMessageLoggingListener">
            <filter type="" />
          </add>
        </listeners>
      </source>
      <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Warning, ActivityTracing" propagateActivity="true">
        <listeners>
          <add type="System.Diagnostics.DefaultTraceListener" name="Default">
            <filter type="" />
          </add>
          <add name="ServiceModelTraceListener">
            <filter type="" />
          </add>
        </listeners>
      </source>
    </sources>
    <sharedListeners>
      <add initializeData="C:tempservices_messages.svclog" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" name="ServiceModelMessageLoggingListener" traceOutputOptions="LogicalOperationStack, DateTime, Timestamp, ProcessId, ThreadId, Callstack">
        <filter type="" />
      </add>
      <add initializeData="C:tempservices_tracelog.svclog" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener, System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" name="ServiceModelTraceListener" traceOutputOptions="LogicalOperationStack, DateTime, Timestamp, ProcessId, ThreadId, Callstack">
        <filter type="" />
      </add>
    </sharedListeners>
</system.diagnostics>

2) Under system.ServiceModel add following:

<diagnostics wmiProviderEnabled="false">
      <messageLogging logEntireMessage="true" logMalformedMessages="true" logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true" logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true" />
</diagnostics>

3) Under C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindowsv7.0ABin start SvcTraceViewer.exe. Load both message trace (services_messages.svclog) and service trace log (services_tracelog.svclog). You can either drag drop files in the tool or open one then add another

4) Look for red bold letters for a problem.

If you want to make your experience editing the WCF configuration more palatable you can use SvcConfigEditor.exe which is found under same folder as SvcTraceViewer.exe (#3). Just open the config file and you should see Diagnostics folder which will allow you to start/stop and configure diagnostics.

Be Sociable, Share!