Developing and debugging orchestrations using DebugView and SOAPTrace tools

The main problem I have with developing BizTalk orchestrations is the fact that I’m so blind when it comes to follow the runtime processing. Using the debugger that is part of the HAT tool is slow and clumsy which IMHO makes the tool almost useless in everyday development. But there is hope!

DebugView

Sysinternals (Windows Sysinternal now - Microsoft bought them last year) DebugView is a wonderful little tool and is especially useful when it comes to figure out what’s actually going on inside an orchestration. Basically the tool listens to system wide debug output. From an orchestration it’s possible to write debug information using the .NET System.Diagnostics namespace and the Debug or Trace class.

Decide on how to filter

There are a couple of handy little tricks that makes DebugView a even better in BizTalk development. First one should try and have something in the debug messages that makes it possible to filter and distinct one’s own (as DebugView listens system wide debug output all running applications debug info will show up). Our team decided on “Sogeti” (our company name) for all our development and to have a method in our BaseLibrary component that outputs something like the below (the BaseLibrary is a small little .NET component with a couple of very useful classes we use company wide in our BizTalk related development).

<div><span style="color: #000000; ">System.Diagnostics.Debug.WrtieLine(</span><span style="color: #000000; ">"</span><span style="color: #000000; ">Sogeti, your debug/trace message here</span><span style="color: #000000; ">"</span><span style="color: #000000; ">)</span></div>

This make is possible to have a filter in DebugView and to for example have it look something like this.

Trace full context of messages

Another little useful trick is to trace the full context of messages. This is done be storing the message in a XmlDocument typed variable and get the OuterXml property of that variable. The below code is and example of this.

<div><span style="color: #000000; ">tempXml </span><span style="color: #000000; ">=</span><span style="color: #000000; "> msgFindPartyRequest.parameters;
System.Diagnostics.Trace.Write(System.String.Concat(</span><span style="color: #000000; ">"</span><span style="color: #000000; ">Sogeti, msgFindPartyRequest: </span><span style="color: #000000; ">"</span><span style="color: #000000; ">, tempXml.OuterXml));</span></div>

Example of a full message trace.

To Trace or Debug - that’s the question

As stated earlier both System.Diagnostics.Debug and System.Diagnostics.Trace has methods (Write, WriteLine and so on) for outputting debug information. However there is only one that stays in your compiled code when switching from Development to Deployment compilation mode (guess which one ;)). So make sure you choose the right class for the right information. I like to have some critical messages left using Trace and be able to trace these even on the test and production server.

DebugView on a remote desktop

When running DebugView on an other server (say a test or a production server) using Remote Desktop I’ve found that ones has to use the console user on the server. This kind of makes sense as if we’re connection “normally” we’re creating a virtual session and that’s not were the debug information is written to.

Microsoft SOAP Toolkit 3.0

This is a totally other tool than DebugView but I thought it fit here any way. It’s a handy tool when working with SOAP based messages. Without it’s very hard to actually figure out how the raw request and response message look and why your orchestration web service is acting the way it does.

The trace tool is placed as a reverse proxy between BizTalk and the Internet. It’s setup by telling the tracing tool which localhost port to listen at (for example 9091 as in the example below) then we’ll redirect to that port by changing the setting in the BizTalk send port.

Finally we’ll set up the trace tool to listen to port 9091 and redirect all traffic to our web service URL at port 80 in this case. So basically the trace tool will catch all the traffic hitting the 9091 port and forward it.

That’s it! This is probably basic stuff for most of you but hopefully it’s useful for someone!

I’ve also noticed that the SOAP Toolkit is deprecated by Microsoft and I’d like to hear if anyone used something else (like Fiddler example) for tracing SOAP messages. I’d also love some other tips, tools and methods you use for debugging BizTalk orchestrations.