Viewing WSE Trace Files

One of the neat features of Microsoft`s WSE Toolkit is that with the click of a button you can have all incoming and outgoing SOAP messages from a client or service recorded in trace files. These files, named by default InputTrace.webinfo and OutputTrace.webinfo, can be helpful for debugging or for gaining a deeper understanding as to the actual XML being scurried back and forth between a client and a Web service. One thing that`s always irked me, though, is that these trace files are simply appended to with each run. This is fine and good, I guess, but it makes it hard to pick through these logs.

Every time I introduce WSE to my Web Services .NET students, I show them the tracing features, and have to sludge through opening the files in UltraEdit32, or Internet Explorer, and paging through the XML and finding the incoming and outgoing messages for the example we had just completed. Well, I decided enough was enough, so I spent this morning whipping up a simply WinForms application that allows you to load in trace files and view individual messages from them, one at a time, as the following screenshot illustrates (in the screnshot I am viewing just Message #9):

I also made it so that you can view the input and output XML for a given message number, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you`d like, you can download the application and complete source code (C#). I have to give a big caveat here, though: I am not an experienced WinForms developer by any stretch of the imagination, so you may find glaring UI errors, terrible design, and offensive source code. Be forewarned. I learned a lot of new things today and played around with things like isolated storage and resizing WinForm controls... things I`ve done zero times before, so the code may be littered with mistakes. Also, I do zero exception handling, so a missing file, or invalid permissions, or malformatted XML, and kablamo, the app`s gonna bomb out on you.

Ok, enough of a caveat. Enjoy the program!