Crm Tracing on Server 2008 problem

I was pulling my hair out trying to get Crm4 tracing working on Server 2008 deployment, I logged onto the server made changes to the tracing registry settings but CRM did create any tracing files. So I double checked them all seemed ok!

At first I thought it was permissions to the trace directory but it transpires this was caused by User Account Control(UAC) virtualising the registry.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965884.aspx

While the registry looked fine to my user account it was a virtual copy! CRM was reading the registry but it didn’t have any trace settings.

Turning off the registry virtualises for the CRM keys, this meant I could change the trace settings. I ran the following from an administrator console to turn off visualisation

REG FLAGS HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM SET DONT_VIRTUALIZE /s

Alternately I think I could have made the changes to the registry under the context of the CRM Application Process so that CRM would see the changes.

CreateCrmService incorrect url, CrmService fails with 404 - Not Found

I deployed a plug-in today to one of our clients dev server only to get a strange “404 - Not Found” exception being reported. The exception was raised from the CrmService, the service object was returned from context.CreateCrmService so it should of been ok. Digging deeper I could see that the URL was pointing to localhost which is incorrect as it should have been the host header http://crm.mydomain.fqdn, as always Google had the answer.

I found a great post where George Doubinski has reflected the issue and highlights the CRM bug

There’s a hot-fix for the issue kb950542 at the time of writing this had to be requested from MS.