How to intercept raw soap request/response (data) from WCF client

You don't have a specific tab that shows just the SOAP message - but the XML tab does include the whole SOAP message - no??

What is missing for you from this snippet of XML here??

UPDATE: John, you're unfortunately not showing what your <system.serviceModel>/<diagnostics> section looks like - mine used for this result looks like this:

<diagnostics>  <messageLogging       logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true"       logMessagesAtServiceLevel="false"      logMalformedMessages="true"       logEntireMessage="true"      maxSizeOfMessageToLog="65535000"       maxMessagesToLog="500" /></diagnostics>

Do you have the same settings? Maybe you're missing logEntireMessage or something else??

I recently encountered the same problem as in the update to the original question: the trace was showing that a message had been sent, but the message itself wasn't there. For me, the fix was to add a System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging source. Here's my system.diagnostics config section:

<system.diagnostics>   <sources>      <source name="System.ServiceModel"               switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing"               propagateActivity="true" >         <listeners>            <add name="xml"/>         </listeners>      </source>      <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging">         <listeners>            <add name="xml"/>         </listeners>      </source>   </sources>   <sharedListeners>      <add name="xml"            type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"            initializeData="C:\logfiles\Traces.svclog" />   </sharedListeners></system.diagnostics>

And my system.serviceModel / diagnostics section:

<diagnostics>   <messageLogging      logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true"      logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true"      logMalformedMessages="true"      logEntireMessage="true"      maxSizeOfMessageToLog="65535000"      maxMessagesToLog="500" /></diagnostics>

Once I added the MessageLogging source, the TraceViewer showed "Message Log Trace" traces which contained the actual SOAP messages.

There is an another way to see XML SOAP - custom MessageEncoder. The main difference from IDispatchMessageInspector / IClientMessageInspector is that it works on lower level, so it captures original byte content including any malformed xml.

In order to implement tracing using this approach you need to wrap a standard textMessageEncoding with custom message encoder as new binding element and apply that custom binding to endpoint in your config.

Also you can see as example how I did it in my project -wrapping textMessageEncoding, logging encoder, custom binding element and config.