Summary

In this chapter, we’ve looked at the debug and trace functionality of ASP.NET. The trace feature allows us to quickly get some insight into the characteristics of the page. We can see the structure of the control tree and the corresponding view state size, and we can get information about where server resources are spent when executing the page. By using the TraceContext object of the Page class, we can write output to investigate problems without worrying about removing them for production environments.

We also looked at how ASP.NET code generation and file compilation works and how this behavior can be controlled and leveraged to isolate issues in your code. We also examined how to use objects in the System.Diagnostics namespace to trace information that might otherwise be difficult to access in production environments.