How to enable verbose tracing for Team Foundation Server
We've had a few situations recently where we've needed to ask customers to send us the verbose logs from the Team Foundation Server Application Tier machine, so I'm posting the instructions on how to do this here as a permanent record for future reference of anyone else who needs to do this. Thanks particularly to BryanMac and BillEss for putting this together - these instructions are specific to Beta 2 and will change for future releases.
Tracing Instructions
Please use the following steps to generate a trace on the Application Tier machine to help us diagnose this problem.
1. Preparing to capture the results
- Open https://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/debugview.shtml, scroll to the bottom of the page and download the Debug View utility (save as)
- Unzip the downloaded package to a temporary location and run Dbgview.exe
- Find the Capture (events), Clear and Save buttons on the dbgview.exe toolbar for later use
- Toggle Capture to off for now and Clear the results
2. Enabling tracing
Use Notepad to make the following changes:
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Enterprise Server\
CURIISDIR\web.config:
-
- Change: <add name="traceLevel" value="1" />
- To: <add name="traceLevel" value="4" />
BISIISDIR\bisserver\web.config
-
- Change: <add name="eSwitch" value="1" />
- To: <add name="eSwitch" value="4" />
3. Generate results
We need a trace from the system that includes the failure during project creation. Since tracing can slow things down considerably, it is fine to leave Capture off until you are ready to hit the Finish button in the project creation wizard (PCW). If you have to retry multiple times, Clear the trace results before hitting the PCW Finish button and then go ahead and turn off Capture and then Save the trace to a file. Please send the log of a run with a failure so that we can analyze it.
Note: When you have captured a failure in a trace log, set the trace values in Step 1 back to “1” to avoid a performance hit.