Making sense of SharePoint errors

So... all you SharePoint v3 developers out there (WSS v3 / MOSS 2007)... don't you just love when you run into that dreaded SharePoint error "Unknown error occurred" message on the generic yellowish & blue page? It's about as effective as the "Service Engine Soon" light on your car dashboard. Of course, sometimes they get a bit more detailed, but you still get stuck without enough info. One thing I do on all my development SharePoint sites is to pop open the web.config and make two tweaks so I get the familiar ASP.NET yellow screen of death (YSOD) with the true exception and underlying call stack: Turn the call stack on by searching for and change it to CallStack="true". Turn off the SharePoint error pages by turning off custom error pages: change to mode="Off". Shane posted about this a few weeks back. After a few questions were posted about this, I figured I'd repost it here as well. Technorati tags: sharepoint, wss, moss, sharepoint error ...

So… all you SharePoint v3 developers out there (WSS v3 / MOSS 2007)… don’t you just love when you run into that dreaded SharePoint error “Unknown error occurred” message on the generic yellowish & blue page? It’s about as effective as the “Service Engine Soon” light on your car dashboard. Of course, sometimes they get a bit more detailed, but you still get stuck without enough info.

One thing I do on all my development SharePoint sites is to pop open the web.config and make two tweaks so I get the familiar ASP.NET yellow screen of death (YSOD) with the true exception and underlying call stack:

Turn the call stack on by searching for and change it to CallStack=“true”.
Turn off the SharePoint error pages by turning off custom error pages: change to mode=“Off”.

Shane posted about this a few weeks back. After a few questions were posted about this, I figured I’d repost it here as well.