Question

I want to be able to see what’s going wrong when my application crashes in iisexpress rather than in the visual studio debugger.

For a WCF application you might trace assemblies like these:

• System.ServiceModel
• System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging
• System.ServiceModel.IdentityModel
• System.ServiceModel.Activation
• System.Runtime.Serialization
• System.IO.Log

I’m assuming you should listen to different assemblies for an asp.net web-api. If that’s correct, which ones?

Answer 1

With Web API all you need to do for tracing the “internals” off the framework is to use an implementation of ITraceWriter.

An example using system.diagnostics is avilable on nuget – http://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Tracing