Stone Coast Web Design's Weblog

I've been learning how to develop parts for WSS 3.0 and have found that debugging them is a real pain.  I picked up this tip from SharePoint Development and Programming FAQ which has proven helpful.

Problem

You receive “The "yourWebPartName" Web Part appears to be causing a problem” or a generic error message when developing a web part.

Cause

Exceptions are caught by SharePoint and a friendly error message is displayed instead of a stack trace.

Resolution

To configure SharePoint to display the full exception needed for debugging make the following changes to your SharePoint site’s web.config file (typically located in \Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\yoursite).

· Find: <SafeMode CallStack="false" />

· Replace with: <SafeMode CallStack="true" />

· Find: <customErrors mode="On" />

· Replace with: <customErrors mode="Off" />

· Find: <compilation debug="false" />

· Replace with: <compilation debug="true" />