Tracing and Debugging

There are two main classes that deal with tracing - Debug and Trace. Both works similar way. Difference is ....

Debug statements can't be compiled into a release version. Debug statement can only be used in debug mode while trace statement can be used both in debug and released mode.

Tracing is actually the process of collecting information about the program's execution. Debugging is the process of finding & fixing errors in our program. Tracing is the ability of an application to generate information about its own execution. When tracing is enabled, in addition to showing user-provided trace content, the System.Web.UI.Page class automatically includes performance data, control-tree structure information, and state management content for every request. The TraceContext Class captures and presents execution details about a web request. This class cannot be inherited. It is available in the System.Web namespace. This object can be declared and instantiated in the following manner. Note that the Page Directive Trace attribute has precedence over the application level trace attribute of web.config. While using application level tracing, we can view the trace output in the trace.axd file of the project.