Tracing with WSE 2.0

When developing with WSE it is often useful to be able to see what is going out on the wire.  Changes in the WSE 2.0 release mean that is no longer possible to use tracing tools such as tcpTrace and MSSoapT.  Christop Schittko has a good post on the background to this problem and shows how to use the inbuilt-WSE trace capabilities to get around it.  There's also another solution, which is to use Mindreef SOAPScope's WebProxy, and as I was writing this I noticed that Mike Taulty has also posted his WSE 2.0 trace tool, which has become my new default favourite.

Background
The previous approach to tracing in WSE was to listen on a one port with a tracing tool, then forward the request onto another port.  WSE 2.0 now checks to make sure that the WS-Addressing To header in the SOAP message matches the address in the HTTP Header.  This means the existing tracing tools will return a fault.

The SOAPScope solution
SOAPScope has implemented it's own version of System.Net.WebProxy that allows proxying to localhost.  It also means that the address in the SOAP envelope matches the address in the HTTP header.  To use it you just need to add the following to the client's config file:

<system.net>
   <defaultProxy>
      <proxy proxyaddress="http://benjaminm:5049" bypassonlocal="false"/>
      <module type="Mindreef.Net.WebProxyEx, MrTools, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=90f6595dbbe888f3" />
   </defaultProxy>
</system.net>

Mike Taulty's solution
Mike has written a new WSE 2.0 Trace Tool that uses custom input and output filters into the WSE Pipeline. These filters copy the message into a new SOAP envelop and post it a tracing 'web' service listening on the a tcp port, using the SOAP Messaging (soap.tcp:\\) support within WSE 2.0.  Using it requires adding the following to the config file:

<microsoft.web.services2>
  <filters>
    <output>
      <add type="WSETracingFilter.WSEOutputFilter,WSETracingFilter, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=Neutral, PublicKeyToken=1c1f2f7177e1ff79" />
    </output>
    <input>
      <add type="WSETracingFilter.WSEInputFilter,WSETracingFilter, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=Neutral, PublicKeyToken=1c1f2f7177e1ff79" />
    </input>
  </filters>
</microsoft.web.services2>

It's very nice! I'm going to be using it tomorrow in my talk at TechEd.