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Tracing TFS data

As I spend a lot of time customizing and extending Team Foundation Server, tracing is very useful for me to view what is sent between the TFS client and server. 

How can you enable this?

By using the .NET diagnostics and trace listeners of course! To enable this we’ll have to tweak our Visual Studio configuration a little bit:

  1. Shut down Visual Studio
  2. Browse to your Visual Studio 2010 installation directory. Most of the time this is something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
  3. Go to the \Common7\IDE folder
  4. Open devenv.exe.config and add the following diagnostics configuration:
       1:  <system.diagnostics> 
       2:    <switches>
       3:      <add name="TeamFoundationSoapProxy" value="4" /> 
       4:      <add name="VersionControl" value="4" /> 
       5:    </switches> 
       6:    <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="3"> 
       7:      <listeners> 
       8:        <add name="myListener" 
       9:     type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" 
      10:         initializeData="c:\logging\tfs.log" /> 
      11:        <add name="perfListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PerfTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" 
      12:                 /> 
      13:      </listeners> 
      14:    </trace> 
      15:  </system.diagnostics>
  5. Save the file
  6. Start Visual Studio again


A lot of data will be logged, so you will see a decrease in performance. Therefore restore your configuration file to its original state after debugging.

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