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Enabling Tracing for System.Net

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In whidbey, System.Net has a cool retail tracing implementation. It writes most calls made to public API's to a TraceListener. You can setup your own tracelisteners, or use the config file to setup a default listener.

This facility is very useful in debugging problems with applications.

Here is the example config file which enables Verbose tracing.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<configuration>
<system.diagnostics>
 <trace autoflush="true" />

 <sources>
 <source name="System.Net">

  <listeners>
   <add name="System.Net"/>
  </listeners>
 </source>
 <source name="System.Net.Sockets">
  <listeners>
   <add name="System.Net"/>
  </listeners>
 </source>
 <source name="System.Net.Cache">
  <listeners>
   <add name="System.Net"/>
  </listeners>
 </source>
 </sources>
        <sharedListeners>
                <add
                  name="System.Net"
                  type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener"
                  initializeData="System.Net.trace.log"
                />
        </sharedListeners>
 <switches>
                <add name="System.Net" value="Verbose" />
  <add name="System.Net.Sockets" value="Verbose" />               
  <add name="System.Net.Cache" value="Verbose" />
 </switches>
</system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

NOTE: If you are doing logging inside of the ASP.NET process, make sure to give the ASP.NET process identity WRITE permissions to the directory where you want the log to be written.