Tracing Tools for .NET Windows Application

Profiling does tell you the methods that were called, the number of times they were called and the time spend in each one, but it does not give you what you are requesting.

What you want is called tracing. There was not built-in mechanism to do that in Visual Studio 2008. One was introduced in 2010. It is called IntelliTrace, but unfortunately, it is available only in the costly Ultimate edition of Visual Studio. I have done a quick search, and there does not seem to be a third party or open source alternative, but a more comprehensive search might turn up something.

For simple tracing, you could use command similar to the following in the important place in your code:

Debug.WriteLine("Entering MethodName - param1=" + param1.ToString() + " - param2=" + param2.ToString());
'Method code
Debug.WriteLine("Exiting MethodName");

The result goes to the Output window by default, but can be redirected to a file (see the Listeners property of the Debug object). You can also use the Trace object in the same way, which would enable for instance to keep Debug for the Output Window and send Trace to a file.

The Debug and Trace objects are activated and deactivated for each configuration of your code through the Advanced Compile Options of the Compile tab of the project's properties window. You could thus have them active in the Debug version of your application, but deactivated for Release so that they not execute when run by the user even if they are in your source code.