What is the Visual Studio Development Server equivalent of the Apache Access Log?

Question

Coming from a PHP/Apache background I'm looking for the equivalent of the Access Log when I'm developing ASP.NET MVC applications in Visual Studio 2008. On the Unix box I'm used to tailing the access_log to get an real time view of which requests is send to the web server:

tail -f access_log

I'm currently looking into ASP.NET Traces. It sort of does the trick, but I would like to know of any alternatives. For instance where is the "access_log" in the Visual Studio Development Server?

Answer 1

I can't answer your question directly, since I use IIS for development, but I never thought about using the web server log for development. I always use the Firefox extension Firebug, but other tools like Fiddler are also fine. They give you a lot more information than a single line with timestamp, url, status code or whatever. You see the whole HTTP request, including cookies, all the cache headers and even the actual content, nicely parsed (e.g. JSON data)