Tuesday, August 14, 2007

* WCF Tool : Service Trace Viewer Tool (SvcTraceViewer.exe)

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  • Can be found  @ following location : <Installation_Drive>\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0\Bin
  • GUI based tool used for viewing trace and message log files generated by WCF framework.
  • Although the log files generated are text files in XML format and can be viewed by other tools also but Service Trace Viewer Tool provides much more than that.
  • It allows to view, merge and filter message in one or more files.
  • The tool supports three types of log files :
    • WCF Tracing File (.svcLog)
    • Event Tracing File (.etl) - Converts it to WCF tracing format before opening.
    • Crimson Tracing file - Converts it to WCF tracing format before opening.
  • It supports the concept of projects where multiple log files can be added to a project, so that when you open a project all the files will be opened automatically.
  • WCF trace file is an activity tracing format file which means the logs are grouped in activities and activities are linked using logical flow. Some of the activities are like Construct ChannelFactory, Processing Message etc.
  • Tool provides four different kinds of views : Activity, Project, Message and Graph.
  • For very large files i.e. in order of more than 500 MB, tools support partial loading of files to improve the navigation performance.

 Next Post -->> WCF Diagnostics : Message Logging

1 comment:

  1. Would you recommend using a tool like AmberPoint (www.amberpoint.com) to monitor WCF applications instead of writing custom code and configurations? What if your system involves WCF and Java services?

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