Tracing has been one of those mechanisms that developers have come to rely on when troubleshooting code. But what happens when the code (in the form of interconnected distributed applications) is running in multiple locations? How do you debug distributed applications reliably? If you are a systems administrator and have to debug a problem in a distributed application that is failing for some reason, how do you go about isolating the issue and providing really specific debug information to the developers who know how to fix the bug?

We recently caught up with WCF Program Manager Laurence Melloul and WCF Evangelish Craig McMurty to check out WCF Tracing. All we can say is wow. The WCF Management Tools team(responsible for WCF Tracing generally) and the WCF Tools team(repsonsible for the WCF Trace Viewer application that runs in Visual Studio) have really taken tracing to a whole new dimension. This is like tracing on steroids!

Laurence explains the details and demos how to use the new Trace Viewer that is part of .NET 3.0. Craig has written a very useful WCF tracing application called Live Trace Viewer. You should download it and check it out.