Debug information in Management Agents and Workflows

When I write custom workflows or XMA's for ILM 2007 and FIM 2010, I like to include a lot of logging to enable customers to debug if something happens - and of course for debugging when I'm testing the code.

I usually use System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine to write to the attached debugger, i.e. Mark Russinovich's DbgView or similar. The nice thing about System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine is that the code will be ignored once you compile a Release build. However, recently a customer of mine would like to have this debug information stay in and be processed even in the Release build.

So how do you go about this without rewriting the logging code entirely?

Tadada, System.Diagnostics.Trace.WriteLine to the rescue. Using Trace.WriteLine instead of Debug.WriteLine make sure that the code is processed no matter the build type.