HTTP 500 Internal Error - IIS websites

Question

I have installed SP 2010 in a Windows Server 2008 R2 loaded environment. I have been using VS 2010 for developing application pages for SP 2010.

I make use of wsp b

Answer 1

To help others, here there is a guide that helped me to find what was wrong with my setup (credits to Rick Barber): Working past 500

1. Load the site from a browser located on the same server. In IE you may need to turn off ‘show friendly http errors.’

2. Temporarily add the following within the appropriate tags in your web.config file:

3. Open up IIS Manager and try to open up some of the different features by double clicking on the icon. If there is an error in the web.config file and it can’t even parse it, sometimes you will get a helpful error.

4. Look in Windows Event Viewer. Sometimes you can find the detailed error logged in there, particularly Application Event Viewer.
5. Setup Failed Request Tracing. This is especially helpful if it is an intermittent 500 error.
6. Look through the web log files. This is especially helpful for an intermittent 500 error. You can often parse the log files to see if there is a trend with a specific page that is throwing a 500 error.