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Having some issues with MSDeploy on a windows server 2008 box, the internal service is throwing a 500 error without putting anything in the server's event logs.

I'm attempting to setup automated deployments using MSBuild/TeamCity/MSDeploy, and this is basically the current halting point, has anyone come across this issue before?

Thanks, Ed

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What version of MSDeploy? 1.0 or 2.0? –  Kev Feb 8 '11 at 19:51
MSDeploy version v2.0 (Sorry, forgot to add that info) –  Ed Woodcock Feb 9 '11 at 11:09
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1 Answer

To find out why you are getting this error you should enable logging.

First, enable Failed Request Tracing for the web management service. You can see how to do this by referring to the "Optional: Set Up Tracing" section of this article:


The "frebs" can be found in:


Open each of the frXXXXXX.xml files with IE and it'll use the freb.xsl transform to generate a nice report.

Don't delete freb.xsl when you're done, it doesn't always get recreated.

Then turn on logging for the web management service:


You want to have the following registry entry configured:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS Extensions\MSDeploy\1]

You can fiddle with the tracing levels/sources to increase and decrease the verbosity of the logs.

As per the article the management service logs are written to:


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Kev, the author confirmed that the version of his tool is "2". This would require the version 2 in the suffix of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE path. Ex: ..\IIS Extensions\MSDeploy\2 –  timmi4sa Jul 27 '13 at 0:13
@timmi4sa - at the time of writing those were the registry keys, trust me. –  Kev Jul 27 '13 at 0:28
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