Custom ASP.NET Page Tracing

Starting a new large-scale project with an ASP.NET front-end, I wanted to add a mechanism to get constant feedback about what my app was doing. Something similar to the built-in tracing mechanism, but far more lightweight. <%@Page trace="true"...%> is great for specific cases, but it probably isn't something you want to leave on all the time while developer - and even if you do, there's so much noise you might miss out on those vital pieces of information.

So after googling around for a good solution and being surprised that I couldn't find anything, I decided to write my own. I can't help but think that there's a well known solution that everyone (but me) uses, so if there is, please tell me! Otherwise here are the very simple steps to reproduce what I have so far.

The approach is simple: store log messages in a List within then HttpContext, and dump it to the page. First, we start off with the class that'll hold each trace message. Within this class we'll hold the actual message, a type (log, debug, error), the elapsed time in milliseconds from the first logged message and the delta in milliseconds from the previous message:

public class TracerItem  {     public TracerItemType Type { get; set; }     public DateTime Dated { get; set; }     public string Message { get; set; }     public int Delta { get; set; }     public int Elapsed { get; set; }       public TracerItem() {}       public TracerItem(DateTime dated, TracerItemType type, string message, int elapsed, int delta)     {        Dated = dated;        Type = type;        Message = message;        Elapsed = elapsed;        Delta = delta;     }  }    public enum TracerItemType  {     Info = 1,     Debug = 2,     Error = 3,  }  

There's really nothing to explain there. Next, we'll create our static Tracer class, which defined the very important Log method:

public static class Tracer  {     public static List<TracerItem> GetLogs()     {        var items = (List<TracerItem>) HttpContext.Current.Items["__tracer"];        if (items == null)        {           items = new List<TracerItem>();           HttpContext.Current.Items["__tracer"] = items;        }        return items;     }     public static void Log(string message, params object[] arguments)     {  #if TRACER        Log(message, TracerType.Info, arguments);