Question

By default, when creating a project, Visual Studio defines the Debug and Trace constants for the debug mode, and Trace only for the release mode.

I’ve set up a bare project which just outputs two logs, one with Trace and one with Debug :

// etc.
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace DebugTrace
{
   public partial class App : Application
   {    
       // [...]

       private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e)
       {
           Debug.WriteLine("[Debug] Application launching");
           Trace.WriteLine("[Release] Application launching");
       }

       // [...]
    }
}

Unfortunately, Visual Studio tells me that :

Error   3   The name 'Trace' does not exist in the current context  C:\Dev\WP7\DebugTrace\DebugTrace\DebugTrace\App.xaml.cs 68  7   DebugTrace

Debug is working as expected.

I’ve searched a bit, and nobody seems to have this error. The project has been just created, I didn’t touch anything, and I don’t understand why Trace is not working although TRACE constant is defined.

I’m using Visual Studio 2010 express with a Windows Phone project.

Answer 1

I think Trace is not available for Window Phone 7. You might want to use some custom library for writing out Trace information through a WebService.

For example take a look at this and this

Trace in Windows Phone 7 won’t make much sense because you shouldn’t store that info on User’s phone. Instead you should pass it to a webservice which can write it out at a place where developer can get it