SharePoint error handling (crank up the volume)

When developing with MOSS sometimes you come across a point in time where the page renders "Error: An unexpected error has occurred". This is absolutely pointless for a developer who really needs to know what has gone wrong. There is however a way to crank up the volume on error reporting for MOSS (but only do it in your development environment).

  1. Edit the web.config file for the site.
  2. Look for "CallStack" in the SafeMode section, change the value from false to true.
  3. Look for "CustomErrors" in System.Web section, change the value from On to Off.

And vola you now have full stack traced .Net error messages instead of the usless "Something - but I am not telling you what - went wrong" message.