There will come this time, either in development or maybe even in production when you are presented with that annoying ‘friendly?’ error page that SharePoint displays when there is an issue somewhere in the code.

Of course this makes debugging a pain, however – there is a solution to turn the ‘friendly’ SharePoint error messages off and get the ASP.NET error message along with the call/stack trace outlining the issue.

By making two quick adjustments to the web.config file for the particular site we can turn the ‘friendly’ SharePoint Error message on / off.

1. Follow the following instructions to do so:
2. On the Web server, navigate to the site directory: [Drive Letter]:InetpubwwwrootwssVirtualDirectories[directory for site]
3. Make a quick backup of the web.config file (simply copy / paste the file in the same directory)
4. Open the web.config file in Notepad.
5. Search for “CallStack”. Change the CallStack status to “true”. Example: <safemode maxcontrols=”200″ callstack=”true” directfiledependencies=”10″ totalfiledependencies=”50″ allowpageleveltrace=”false”>
6. Search for “CustomErrors”. Change the mode to “Off”. Example: <customerrors mode=”Off”>
7. Save and close the file.

And there you go, now you will see the the ASP.NET error message along with the call stack/stack trace screen outlining the issue.

To turn the SharePoint ‘friendly’ error messages back on, just walk through the steps setting the CallStack to “false” and customErrors mode to “On”.