How to debug Windows Services written in .NET? (part I)

Diagnosing Windows Services might sometimes be cumbersome – especially when errors occur during the service start. In this two-parts series I am going to show you different ways how to handle such problems in production. In the first part we will focus on “exceptions discovery” techniques which very often are enough to figure out why our service is not working. In the second part we will setup a debugging environment and attach a debugger to our service. Let’s start then.

Using MySql database to save .NET traces

I’m a great fan of the Essential.Diagnostics and this post will be again committed to this library. In our company we use MS SQL Server as our main database server and an instance of MySql to store logs from applications. If you are using System.Diagnostics tracing you probably lack more advanced trace listeners (like the ones provided by log4net). A remedy for this problem might be the aforementioned Essential.Diagnostics library. In this short post I will show you how to configure the SqlDatabaseTraceListener to work with MySql database.

Grouping application traces using ActivityId (System.Diagnostics)

I don’t need to stress how tracing (logging) is important in any application. Without logs we are often unable to diagnose the cause of the failure. Logs also help us track application behavior and usage over time. Fortunately there are numerous libraries (including .NET framework itself) that can help us create meaningful logs. In this post I would like to show you how to, using System.Diagnostics classes, nicely group application traces by activities to which they correspond.