In this blog I will talk about difference between tracing and Debugging in ASP.NET

It is technique that allows us to understand what our application is doing so that we can debug or monitor the application. Tracing helps us to find out the defects in a web application. Tracing is ASP.Net allows us to view this data of every single request that is made for an asp.net page.

This diagnostic information contains run time data which contains execution path, session states HTTP header and other related information to diagnose the application.

What is the difference between debugging and tracing?

One liner statement can be when a web application is monitored in development phase it is termed as “Debugging” and when it is monitored in production environment it is termed as “Tracing”. Implementation of tracing in.net is a very easy task.

Visual Studio.NET provides debugging tools:

Integrated debugger: Integrated with the visual studio itself. There is no need to run a separate tool to debug your application.

Visual debugger: This is separate tool. Using this tool you can debug complex bugs that you can not fix using the aforementioned integrated debugger.

ASP.Provides two classes ‘Debug’ and ’Trace’.

During Debugging, you can  see how exactly your code is executed by stepping line by line, viewing the values of your variables during each step and showing how  these values are changed by each step. You can change the value of certain variable. You can move the execution point and run application to another point.

Breakpoints:  

1. Breakpoints are not actual source code you have to add to your program. You don’t type a break point statement into your source code.

2. Because they are no statement, breakpoints produce no extra code and never changing the size of your code file.

3. You can set or disable a breakpoint without changing your source code.

4. A breakpoint gives you the ability to pause the execution of your program at a certain point you specify and this is very important in large applications.

Example of breakpoint

Example of Tracing