Debugging SharePoint 2010

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:50:25 +0000

I’m posting this here as, despite using this all the time, I still find myself looking it up.

There are a couple of things you can do, in your Dev environment, to assist with debugging SharePoint and your custom solutions.

CustomErrors and SafeMode

This should only be used in a Dev environment, but you can disable the “friendly” error messages in SharePoint and replace them with full exceptions, and, if desirable, a stack trace.

You can edit the web.config for your application. Note: SharePoint has various web.configs spewed about the place, and for this to work, you need to edit the one located in

Could not load web.config file. The given key was not present in the dictionary.

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:10:06 +0000

Quick hint about debugging SharePoint projects in Visual Studio 2010. You may find a bizarre error where deploying projects/solutions is fine, but trying to debug doesn’t work. You see an error alert with the text:

“Could not load the Web.config configuration file. Check the file for any malformed XML elements, and try again. The following error occurred: The given key was not present in the dictionary.”

Checking the Web.config shows no malformed XML at all. One thing to check into is the configuration of alternate access mappings in Central Administration. For debugging to work, the Site URL property of your SharePoint project must match the URL of the Default zone for your web application.

Web.config on Matt Thornton

Debugging SharePoint 2010

Could not load web.config file. The given key was not present in the dictionary.