[Updated for Visual Studio 2010]

Team Foundation client tracing is useful for viewing what is sent between the TFS client and server.  Instructions on how to turn this on for Visual Studio 2010 are as follows:

Visual Studio

  1. Shut down Visual Studio
  2. Using Windows Explorer navigate to the following directory:
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
    (replace c: with appropriate drive)
  3. Make a backup copy of devenv.exe.config
  4. Edit devenv.exe.config by adding the following before the last </configuration> :

    <system.diagnostics>
      <switches>
        <add name="TeamFoundationSoapProxy" value="4" />
        <add name="VersionControl" value="4" />
      </switches>
      <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="3">
        <listeners>
          <add name="myListener"
       type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.TeamFoundationTextWriterTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
           initializeData="c:\tf.log" />
          <add name="perfListener" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.PerfTraceListener,Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
                   />
        </listeners>
      </trace>
    </system.diagnostics>

  5. Trace data will be written to "c:\tf.log" (bold above).  Change this file name if you prefer
  6. Save the file
  7. Start Visual Studio
  8. Run steps you are interested in tracing
  9. Open c:\tfs-tracefile.log or whatever file you specified in step 5
  10. This writes alot of data, so you will want to restore to the original setting when finished by copying the original file back or commenting out the lines in step 4 by surrounding the lines with <!-- and --> .

 

 TF Command Line

You can trace commandline traffice between tf.exe and the TFS server by doing the save as above except to tf.exe.config