Instrumenting an application with tracing has become increasingly sophisticated as the .NET framework has matured. Find out how to use tracing in your applications, how to fine-tune tracing to your needs with custom listeners, and how to gain field-level and robust formatting control over the output.
by Michael Sorens
March 14, 2008
iagnostics, also known as "program tracing," is a crucial—and often overlooked and underappreciated—component of application development. I have long been an ardent believer in diagnostic support, and have written diagnostic systems from scratch for a diverse assortment of software and hardware products, including integrated circuit design tools, laser printers, and user interfaces. As Microsoft's .NET Framework Developer's Guide puts it, diagnostics is:
"…a way to monitor the execution of your application while it is running. You can add tracing and debugging instrumentation to your .NET application when you develop it, and you can use that instrumentation both while you are developing the application and after you have deployed it.… [Y]ou can record information about errors and application execution to logs, text files, or other devices for later analysis."
What You'll Cover
Despite a plethora of diagnostic information on MSDN and elsewhere, you'll get some material from this article that's difficult or impossible to find anywhere else, such as:
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iagnostics, also known as "program tracing," is a crucial—and often overlooked and underappreciated—component of application development. I have long been an ardent believer in diagnostic support, and have written diagnostic systems from scratch for a diverse assortment of software and hardware products, including integrated circuit design tools, laser printers, and user interfaces. As 
