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Don’t guess when it comes to performance…a RegEx story.
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# Monday, 27 September 2010
Monday, 27 September 2010 00:19:44 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) ( Azure | Perfmon )

I’ve blogged before about how some things are different in the cloud, namely Azure.  That post dealt with finding out why your Azure Role crashed by using some of the logging facilities and storage available in Azure.  That’s kind of a worst case scenario, though.  Often, you’ll just want to gauge the health of your application.  In the non-cloud world, you’d just use the Windows Performance Monitor to capture performance counters that tell you things like your CPU utilization, memory usage, request execution time, etc.  All of these counters are great to determine your overall application and server health as well as helping you troubleshoot problems that may have arisen with your application. 

I’m often surprised at how many developers have never used Perfmon before or think that it is purely a task that administrators need to care about.  Performance is everyone’s responsibility and a tool like Perfmon is invaluable if you need to gain an accurate understanding of your application’s performance. 

When you’ve needed to log counters in the past, you would have probably become familiar with this dialog:

image

In the Azure world, you can add counters to be collected in a variety of ways.  A popular way is just to add the counters you want in your OnStart() event. 

public override bool OnStart()
{
DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration dmc = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration();

// Add counter(s) to collect.
dmc.PerformanceCounters.DataSources.Add(
new PerformanceCounterConfiguration()
{
CounterSpecifier = @"\Processor(*)\*",
SampleRate = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5)
});

// Set transfer period and filter.
dmc.PerformanceCounters.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5);

// Start logging, using the connection string in your config file.
DiagnosticMonitor.Start("DiagnosticsConnectionString", dmc);

...

return base.OnStart();
}

This gets the job done quite nicely and even though we’re sampling our performance counter every 5 seconds, the data won’t get written to our persistent storage until we hit the 5 minute mark.

So, let’s fast forward a bit.  You’ve added counters to monitor and now you want to view some of this data.   Fortunately, there are a few tools at your disposal:

For example, using the Azure Management Tool, you can navigate to the Diagnostics/Analysis section to view the performance monitor counters you stored. 

image

Herein lies one of the challenges you may encounter.  Azure is kind of a different beast and it doesn’t store the data in storage using the typical BLG format.  Instead, if you look at the raw data, it will be in an XML or tabular format and may look like:

image

While this is nice and clean, the problem you’ll hit is the visualization of the data.  Most organizations use Perfmon to visualize the counter data you record.  Alas, in this case you can’t use it that way right out of the box.  Fortunately, my friend Tom Fuller and I realized this gap and he wrote a plug-in to the Azure Management Tool that will transform this data from the format above into a native BLG format.  He wrote up a great blog entry with step-by-step instructions and the source code here. You can also download a compiled version of the extension here (along with the Windows Azure MMC) here.  To install the plugin, just copy the DLL into the \WindowsAzureMMC\release folder:

image

Then, when you open up the tool, you’ll see another option in that dropdown in the Diagnostics > Analysis window:

image

Then, when you click show, you’ll get a nice popup telling you to click here to view your data in Perfmon:

image

Then, when you click on it, Perfmon will start with all of the counters added to the display:

image

A few things to note:

  • It will store the resulting BLG file at the following path:

c:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Temp\<File Name>.blg

The BLG can be used in a variety of applications.  For example, you can use it with the great PAL tool.  

  • All of the counters will appear in the graph by default.  Depending upon the amount of data you’re capturing, this could give you data overload.  Just something to be aware of.

Until next time.

# Sunday, 19 September 2010
Sunday, 19 September 2010 13:30:02 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) ( Performance | RegEx )

Ricky_Bobby_I_wanna_go_fastMany times, when I work with a customer, it’s because they’ve tried to accomplish something and need a little extra help.  Often, this falls into the application optimization area.  For example, a few years ago, I had a customer that was developing a rather sophisticated SharePoint workflow that had some custom code that would process and merge two Excel spreadsheets together.  They were using Excel 2007 so their merging was being done using the excellent Open XML SDK.  To their credit, the application did what it needed to do – but it took about an hour to process these spreadsheets.  The developers on the project knew about the performance problems but as so often happens, they thought they knew where the bottlenecks were and how they should approach optimizing it.  So, they started injecting some tracing into their code and worked hard to optimize this lengthy process.  After a while, though, they had only shaved a few seconds off of that 60 minute time and while they did show some improvement – they knew they needed to get the processing done even faster for this to become a viable solution for their organization.  So, they sent me a simple repro of the code and together in just a few short days, we were able to get the processing from 60 minutes to under a minute.  That’s a BIG win.  Big like the Titanic big. 

I love these types of engagements because, well, I like to make things faster.  The biggest problem that I see, though, is that some people shy away from using the tools in optimization scenarios because they’ve been so invested in their code that they think they know why it’s not performing.  This is the “psychic” effect and the mindset is usually something like this: 

“I wrote this darn code and while I was writing it – I knew this method could be improved so now I’m going to finally optimize the darn thing.” 

It sounds good in-theory, right?  You wrote the code, so you should know how to improve it and really, what’s a tool going to tell you that you don’t already know?  In truth, it can tell you quite a bit.  In other situations, the developers will add some instrumentation (via tracing/debugging statements) to what they perceive as the critical code paths and the resultant timing points to one area when the problem really resides in a completely different section of code.  That’s right, folks, your tracing statements may be lying to you.  So what’s a developer to do?  Well, use the tools, of course – the right tool for the right job, as they say.  Let me expand upon that in the context of some code that yours truly wrote a little while ago.

The Problem

A few short weeks ago, I posted a entry about parsing your ASP.NET event log error messages.  For those that didn’t read it, we just convert the EventLog messages to XML, parse the messages using RegEx.Match and then generate some statistics on them.  The code I provided on that blog entry appeared to be very fast when it was processing a few records – but as the XML files grew, I started noticing that it seemed to take longer and longer to process the results.  So, I did what any developer does initially.  We’ll add some instrumentation into our code to see if we can figure out the problem.  This usually takes the form of something like the following:

Console.WriteLine("Start:  Load XDocument." + DateTime.Now.ToString());
XDocument document = XDocument.Load(@"C:\Work\TestData\AllEVTX\MyData.xml");
Console.WriteLine("End: Load XDocument." + DateTime.Now.ToString());

Console.WriteLine("Start: Load Messages into object." + DateTime.Now.ToString());
var messages = from message in document.Descendants("Message")
select EventLogMessage.Load(message.Value);
Console.WriteLine("End: Load Messages into object." + DateTime.Now.ToString());

Console.WriteLine("Start: Query Objects." + DateTime.Now.ToString());
var results = from log in messages
group log by log.Exceptiontype into l
orderby l.Count() descending, l.Key
select new
{
ExceptionType = l.Key,
ExceptionCount = l.Count()
};
Console.WriteLine("End: Query Objects." + DateTime.Now.ToString());

Console.WriteLine("Start: Output Exception Type Details." + DateTime.Now.ToString());
foreach (var result in results)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} : {1} time(s)",
result.ExceptionType,
result.ExceptionCount);
}
Console.WriteLine("End: Output Exception Type Details." + DateTime.Now.ToString());

As you can see, all I’ve done is taken the code and slapped some Console.WriteLine statements with a DateTime.Now call to find out when the operation starts and when it completes.  If I run this code I get the following timings:

Start:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 11:28:08 AM
End:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
Start:  Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
End: Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
Start:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
End:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
Start:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 11:28:09 AM
End:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 11:28:49 AM

This is clearly a problem  Now, the question is why?

The Research

This might lead you to believe that the simple loop I have to get the ExceptionType and the ExceptionCount was the root of all evil, so to speak.  The problem, though, is that there’s not really a lot you can do to improve this:

foreach (var result in results)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} : {1} time(s)",
result.ExceptionType,
result.ExceptionCount);
}

Oh sure, you could use the excellent Parallel functionality in .NET 4 to send off the work to alternate threads.  So, you might do something like this:

Parallel.ForEach(results, result=> {

Console.WriteLine("{0} : {1} times(s)",
result.ExceptionType,
result.ExceptionCount);

});

But if you re-run the test, you get the following results:

Start:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
End:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
Start:  Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
End: Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
Start:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
End:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
Start:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 11:46:20 AM
End:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 11:46:54 AM

Wait a second…is it taking longer now???  That’s just not right.  At this point, you should take a step back and tell yourself “STOP GUESSING AND JUST USE THE PROFILER.”  So, always being one to listen to myself, I kick off the Visual Studio profiler and immediately it shows us the “hot path”.  This was actually a nice improvement in the VS2010 profiler.  Right on the summary page, it will show us our most expensive call paths:

image

But wait, it’s pointing to the RegEx.Match(…).  Why is it pointing to that?  From my own metrics above, I see that the loading of the Message strings into an object takes less than a second to execute.  Well, the real reason is that LINQ uses kind of a lazy loading algorithm.  Basically, it won’t necessarily process your queries until you try to do something with the data.  Yes, that’s an over-simplification but in our case, it means that my EventLogMessage.Load(…) method won’t be called until I actually try to do something with the data.  So, now, armed with this information, I can take a look at my Load() method and see what it’s actually doing and how it’s using the RegEx.Match(…) functionality:

Match myMatch = s_regex.Match(rawMessageText);

EventLogMessage message = new EventLogMessage();

message.Eventcode = myMatch.Groups["Eventcode"].Value;
message.Eventmessage = myMatch.Groups["Eventmessage"].Value;
message.Eventtime = myMatch.Groups["Eventtime"].Value;
message.EventtimeUTC = myMatch.Groups["EventtimeUTC"].Value;
...

return message;

So, basically we’re using the Match(…) to take that Message property and parse it out into the properties of the EventLogMessage object.  The fact that this is the slowest part of the code shouldn’t necessarily shock you.  Jeff Atwood wrote up a good blog entry a few years ago on something like this.  If we look just at the RegEx.Match(…) in the profiler, we see that the problem isn’t necessarily with each Match call but the overall cost with 10,000+ calls:

Function Name Number of Calls Min Elapsed Inclusive Time Avg Elapsed Inclusive Time Max Elapsed Inclusive Time
System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match(string)
10,881 1.01 3.27 684.29

The Fix

So, now that we know the problem and the reason for it – what’s a Dev to do?  Well, at this point, we should be thinking of an alternate way of performing this parsing without using RegEx.  The simplest method is just to use some general string parsing, so we’ll start off with replacing our large RegEx pattern with a simple string array:

public static readonly string[] ParserString = new string[] {
@"Event code:" ,
@"Event message:" ,
@"Event time:" ,
@"Event time (UTC):" ,
@"Event ID:" ,
...
@"Stack trace:" ,
@"Custom event details:"};

This array will be used in our fancy new GetValue method:

private static string GetValue(string rawMessageText, int Key)
{
int startLoc = rawMessageText.IndexOf(ParserString[Key]);
int endLoc;
if (Key + 1 == ParserString.Length)
endLoc = rawMessageText.Length;
else
endLoc = rawMessageText.IndexOf(ParserString[Key + 1], startLoc);

return rawMessageText.Substring(startLoc + ParserString[Key].Length, endLoc - startLoc - ParserString[Key].Length);
}

This method accepts our raw message string and a key index.  This method just finds the existence of a string like “Event message:” in our raw message and then finds the index of the next string, like “Event time:” and subtracts the two to get at the value of the field.  For example, given the following string:

“… Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred. Event time: …”

The red text are the keys and the highlighted blue text is the string between them.  The idea for the above GetValue(…) method was actually provided by a fellow PFE engineer, Richard Lang during a late night chat session.

The last step to this process is just to call the GetValue(…) method from our new Load method:

public static EventLogMessage Load(string rawMessageText)
{
EventLogMessage message = new EventLogMessage();

int Key = 0;
message.Eventcode = GetValue(rawMessageText, Key++);
message.Eventmessage = GetValue(rawMessageText, Key++); ;
message.Eventtime = GetValue(rawMessageText, Key++); ;
...
return message;

}

So, now we’ve essentially removed the need for RegEx by implementing our own string parsing algorithm.  Once we compile the code and run our application again, we see some major improvements:

Start:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
End:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
Start:  Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
End: Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
Start:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
End:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
Start:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 12:55:31 PM
End:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 12:55:33 PM

We essentially improved the processing of our records from 40 seconds to under 2 seconds.  I’d say that’s a pretty big improvement.  Even better, we can use our Parallel.ForEach(…) code from above to make this even faster since we’re no longer bound by the RegEx parser:

Start:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
End:  Load XDocument.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
Start:  Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
End: Load Messages into object.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
Start:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
End:  Query Objects.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
Start:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 1:00:13 PM
End:  Output Exception Type Details.9/19/2010 1:00:14 PM

So now it takes just about a second to process these records.  Considering it’s processing over 10,000 event log messages, I’d say this is acceptable performance, for now.

Closing Comments

I just want to say a few things real quick.  RegEx is not inherently evil.  It is still one of the fastest and easiest methods to consume and parse data.  You should not feel the need to go back to your own applications that are working just fine and refactor all of your code to strip out the RegEx expressions.  It just so happens that sometimes too much of a good thing can be bad for your health.  In our case, with over 10,000 RegEx.Match(…) calls in rapid succession, the RegEx appeared to be our bottleneck.  This may or may not be the root cause of your own performance problems.  The key takeaway from this blog entry should be that you should NOT guess when it comes to optimizing code paths.  Instead, you should use the tools available at your disposal to find the bottleneck. 

Until next time.

# Saturday, 11 September 2010
Saturday, 11 September 2010 20:43:24 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) ( Life | Productivity )

icon_Outlook_webAs with most people, I hate to do the same thing more than once.  In-fact, I had a job in college where I audited expense reports and then had to enter them into an application so they could be paid.  The auditing of the expense report was actually fun because I got to see some interesting things people would attempt to pass off as “business expenses” – like the guy that tried to expense an entire addition to his house claiming that it was for his new office.  That said, I absolutely HATED the data entry part.  It was repetitive and boring and I just couldn’t understand why the person submitting expense reports couldn’t do the data entry into some application (they were already using Excel) and then electronically submit the data into our system for review and payment.  That led me to design and build a simple application (in my off-time) to do exactly that.  It was fairly sophisticated (for a college student doing something in his down time).  The project was a tremendous success and it increased efficiency on my team to the Nth degree because it cut out steps, reduced the volume of duplicate data entry and everything was online.  It was just a better workflow.  I had optimized a fairly simple business process and I was seeing the tremendous dividends that such a project could have in the business world.  In-fact, it was so successful and my team became so efficient that I eventually got “let go” because there just wasn’t enough work to go around anymore and the other folks on the team were permanent employees and I was a lowly hourly worker. 

So, while that situation didn’t turn out so well for me, I became addicted to optimization – be it in software or my own personal life.  And I’ve carried that lesson forward into the years since.  For example, a few years back, I wrote a Quick Link Plugin for Windows Live Writer.  It was a very simple plugin that would open up a form in Windows Live Writer to do a web search and then quickly insert the link into your blog post.  This was another way that I was optimizing my (digital) life in that I hated having to leave the WLW environment to look something up and then copying/pasting the link back into the WLW window.  It’s painful, repetitive and just plain wasteful. 

Scott Hanselman blogged a bit ago about whether recipients of your e-mails deserve the gift of your keystrokes.  I found it an interesting read and I highly recommend it.  As an alternative to reaching only one person, he recommended taking it an extra step and blogging about it or posting it to a wiki and then sending the link to the individual.  It’s a great idea but in my role, I’m often asked similar questions over and over and the customer doesn’t want to wade through a list of links to get the answer they need.  Or, taking it one step further – once you blog something once, how do you retain that link somewhere so you don’t have to go hunting around for the URL when you need it later on down the line.   

My Solution (for now)

The solution that I’ve used for years is to put these resources and snippets in my Outlook Signature list.  If you’re not aware of Outlook signatures, well, I can’t really help you.  Kidding!  Signatures have been in Outlook for years and have been used primarily to append contact information and what-not into your e-mail.  It always struck me as kind of odd that Outlook allows you to add so many signatures when really, how many ways to say “I’m so and so and here is my information” could you possibly have?  So, I’ve decided to repurpose that list for my own uses.  I will essentially add a new signature for each important blurb/link/etc. to my list.  Then, when I am deeply into writing an e-mail and I get a question I’ve answered before, like:

“How can I turn on ValidateIntegratedModeConfiguration for all of the sites on my server and not allow my applications to override it?”

I can simply go to my signature list and select that item and it will magically appear in my e-mail:

image

Less clicks and key presses for me, the person gets their response quicker – it’s a win-win all around.  I’ve even prefixed my most frequently used signatures at the top with an “_” in the name since I don’t want to go hunting for the stuff I use frequently.  You may have also noticed that I have one called “_Expense Report”.  This is just a simple e-mail that I send to my boss when I have some receipts I need to send her so I can get my expense reports approved.  Yes, it’s likely a micro-optimization but if it shaves about 2 minutes off each of those e-mails I send:

2 minute savings * 4 expense reports/month * 12 months/year = 96 minutes savings/year

This makes it totally worth it for me.  I can’t wait until we put something like the Visual Studio “Snippet” functionality in Outlook or someone writes an Evernote add-in for Outlook to allow me to search and insert text from my notes.  That would just make my life complete.

Until next time…

# Friday, 03 September 2010
Friday, 03 September 2010 01:41:11 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00) ( .NET 4 | WCF )

Often, I’ll have a customer that wants to utilize a new feature in the .NET framework but they don’t necessarily know where to start or they have a large investment in another area and they’re afraid of the amount of rework required to get something working.  This week, for example, I was teaching a customer about WPF and they asked:

“We have several class libraries and we’d like to expose them as WCF services.  How can we do it?”

Yes, it was a bit off-topic from WPF but not really.  I’ve found that when a customer chooses to start investing in a newer technology, like WPF, I’ve found that they also want to look at ways to revamp their existing applications to use other new features.  But I digress…

In pre-.NET 4.0, if you wanted to expose a class as a WCF endpoint and make it available in IIS as an SVC file, you would have to do the following:

  1. Create a new WCF Service (in the same category as WebSite).
  2. Add  a bunch of new “WCF Service” classes (files with an extension of “.SVC”).
  3. Write some code to call out to your existing class library from the WCF Service.

It’s not exactly a painful experience but would require a bit of work to get everything up and running.  In many cases, if you have a huge investment in something like a class library, the amount of work may be incredibly daunting.  Fortunately, using some of the features in WCF 4 (part of .NET 4), this type of story is ridiculously easy.  The steps that we’ll follow are the following:

  1. Decorate your existing class.
  2. Add configuration.
  3. Deploy to IIS

Then, I’ll discuss additional options for debugging your new service.

Step 1:  Decorate your existing class

So, I’m sure we all have a class in some Class Library somewhere that looks like this:

public class MyBusinessLogic
{

public string GetName(int id)
{

return "My ID is: " + id;

}

public MyDataClass GetEmpInformation(int id)
{

return new MyDataClass()
{
FirstName = "Greg",
LastName = "Varveris",
Occupation = "Developer"
};


}
}

This is just a simple little business logic class that exposes two public methods – GetName and GetEmpInformation.  So, let’s say we wanted to make this class accessible as a WCF service.  The first thing we need to do is add a reference to the .NET 4 version of System.ServiceModel in our Class Library project. 

image

I’ve included a screenshot to our left just to further show that there is no special sauce here.  All of the assemblies being referenced in this project are straight up class library defaults.  Now that we have the assembly referenced, let’s decorate our class with two attributes:

  • ServiceContract – This decorates our class and tells .NET that we have a WCF Service.
  • OperationContract – This decorates our methods and tells .NET which methods/functions we want to expose in our service.

The decorated class will now look like:

[ServiceContract]
public class MyBusinessLogic
{

[OperationContract]
public string GetName(int id)
{

return "My ID is: " + id;

}

[OperationContract]
public MyDataClass GetEmpInformation(int id)
{

return new MyDataClass()
{
FirstName = "Greg",
LastName = "Varveris",
Occupation = "Developer"
};


}
}

And really that’s all you have to do from the code side.

Step 2:  Add Configuration

WCF configuration has always been synonymous with “WOAH” before.  Even using the great configuration editor tool, you may end up with a large amount of XML in your .config file.  This is mostly because WCF is just so darn extensible.  Well, for our scenario, we’ll use some great new features in WCF 4 to make the configuration a breeze:

  • File-less Activation
  • Default Configuration model

You can read-up about each of these features in the nice MSDN documentation. Basically, WCF 4 exposes the ability to map a file-name to a class and then it can expose a default endpoint (using BasicHttpBinding).  For our scenario my entire config file is:

<configuration>
<system.serviceModel>
<serviceHostingEnvironment>
<serviceActivations>
<add relativeAddress="MyBusinessLogic.svc" service="WCFSample.Library.MyBusinessLogic"/>
</serviceActivations>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>
<behaviors>
<serviceBehaviors>
<behavior>
<serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
</behavior>
</serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>
</system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

That’s it.  In the first snippet, we are adding a relative address of “MyBusinessLogic.svc” which will point to our MyBusinessLogic class we defined above.  The second section along the bottom is just to enable the service metadata. 

The only minor manual snafu you’ll need to handle is that Visual Studio won’t let you add a web.config to a Class Library project.  This can be easily remedied in a variety of ways.  I just added an app.config to my project and then changed the name from “app.config” to “web.config”.  Then, you just need to tell it to Copy to the output directory.  This makes our project look like the following:

image

Step 3:  Deploy to IIS

Now that we have our minuscule configuration and trivial decorations to our class, we need to host our service somewhere.  For this, we’ll just use IIS with an ASP.NET 4.0 application pool.  The structure of this folder will need to have the assemblies in a “bin” folder and the web.config in the root.

image

The bin folder is required so that the IIS engine can find your assembly.  Once you configure this in IIS, you can simply navigate to your service (make sure you include the SVC in your url) in a browser and you’ll see the glorious WCF Service start page. For example, on my machine, when I navigate to: http://localhost/SampleWCFService/MyBusinessLogic.svc, I’ll see:

image

Debugging your service

So you have created your service, added configuration to it and deployed it to your hosting environment and everything is running smoothly.  What if you want to debug the service in Visual Studio?  Well, you really have 3 different options:

  1. Attach to the instance of w3wp hosting your WCF service.
  2. Cassini…errr, the ASP.NET Development Server.
  3. IIS Express

I personally prefer either options 2 or 3 as it provides that seamless debugging experience we all crave where we just hit the “Green Arrow” to start the debugging session.  With either option you select, we’ll need to make one or two minor configuration changes.

First, we’ll need to tell the solution to start our process.  For this, you can right-click on your solution file in the Solution explorer and select “Properties”.  In this window, you’ll need to select the Multiple Startup Projects radio button and set both of your projects (the Client and the Service) to the “Start” option.

image

Second, you’ll need to add a pre/post-build step for your service to structure the output folder correctly.  Since we will deleting the contents of the “Bin” folder wherever our assemblies are being output, the command we will use is:

if exist "$(TargetDir)bin" del /q "$(TargetDir)bin\*.*"

Then, for our post-build step, we will need to create the bin folder if it doesn’t exist and then copy over our DLL’s into that bin folder.  Those commands will be:

if not exist "$(TargetDir)bin" mkdir "$(TargetDir)bin"
copy "$(TargetDir)\*.dll" "$(TargetDir)\bin"
copy "$(TargetDir)\*.pdb" "$(TargetDir)\bin"
del "$(TargetDir)\*.dll"
del "$(TargetDir)\*.pdb"

That will take our output directory from zero to hero quite nicely:

image

Now that the prerequisites are met, we just need to point our local hosting tool (either the Development Server or IIS Express) at that folder.  We’ll do this in the Debug tab of the project properties.   Set the “Start External Program” radio button and set the path to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\DevServer\10.0\WebDev.WebServer40.EXE

Then, in the Command Line Arguments, specify the following:

/port:12345
/path:"<path to folder containing bin & web.config>"
/vpath:/myservice

Then, you can set a Service Reference on whatever vpath you chose above.  For example, my service reference points to:  http://localhost:12345/myservice/MyBusinessLogic.svc

Once the service reference is set, you can just hit the fancy green arrow to start debugging:

image

Enjoy!