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Language: ASP.NET
Expertise: Advanced

Jan 24, 2005

Say goodbye to inline Response.Write statements for debugging in ASP.NET! In addition to its built-in debugging capabilities, Visual Studio .NET also supports a new mechanism for run-time debugging, called page tracing.

To enable or disable page-level tracing, access the HTML code of your ASPX page. Modify the Page statement to include:

<@ Trace="True" ...

Once the Trace attribute is set, run your ASP.NET application and observe the results. At the bottom of your page output, you should see information, covering controls, cookies, server variables, sessions, and more. You'll also be able to use the Write and Warn methods of the intrinsic Trace object to output information to the browser. This information comes at the end of the page's normal output, with Warn statements showing up in red. This simple directive can be extremely helpful in debugging pages, following the values of variables, seeing the ServerVariables collection, etc.

Note: Do not leave Tracing on in production environments.