Viewing WF trace logs

Question

We're encountering "silent" aborts when Windows Workflows (hosted in IIS) are persisted using SqlWorkflowInstanceStore.

According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2022538 :

If the service is self-hosted or web-hosted, this issue creates a diagnostic trace. Additionally, exception errors and warnings are generated in the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) trace log.

That article resolved our first issue (attempting to promote a Boolean property), but now we're encountering a new issue with identical symptoms. In order to diagnose it, we need to view these trace logs.

In every case, I am not seeing these logs in Event Viewer. It's very possible I'm not looking in the right place, or that I have to enable something first.

• How can I view these logs?
• (Bonus question) How can I subscribe to the diagnostic trace in a workflow?
• (Bonus question 2) How can I view these logs if I am debugging the workflow in Visual Studio 2010 with the default web server (formerly Cassini)?

Answer 1

The ETW Tracking Provider writes its logs to the Analytics log under Application Server-Applications.

You can add standard .NET tracing using a trace source with name "System.Activities". See here for an example config.

Now quite sure I understand the third question as viewing the logs is independent of the hosting application choosen.