Why don't I have Tracefmt.exe

Question

I followed this spectacularly worthless piece of drivel from MS http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899115 in order to turn on MSDTC trace.

As it fails to follow through on a very reasonable and obvious expectation of the reader, specifically "how do I read this binary log file?" I read this equally worthless KB document http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms678917%28VS.85%29.aspx

Only to find out that I can't read the log file because I'm missing some executable called Tracefmt.exe, and I'm apparently the only person on Google or MSDN with this question.

So I pose this question to probably the best tech forum on the web...

Why don't I have Tracefmt.exe and where do I get it?

or, to get to the point...

How do I read my MSDTC trace logs?

Answer 1

tracefmt (and traceview which is easier to use) are available in the Windows Driver Kit (WDK). It is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2105564e-1a9a-4bf4-8d74-ec5b52da3d00&displaylang=en. It is in the WDK since this tracing technology is more commonly used in device drivers.

Answer 2

Tracefmt.exe comes with the Windows Driver Kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2105564e-1a9a-4bf4-8d74-ec5b52da3d00&displaylang=en

Answer 3

DTC Tracing

The Distributed Services Support Team blog goes over how to trace the DTC in more detail.

Windows Driver Kit

The links in the accepted answer seem to be broken. I've found the Windows Driver Kit homepage and current download link.

Once you have the ISO downloaded and you're at the installation screen, Microsoft Windows Driver Kit, select only Tools from Full Development Environment. The tracefmt.exe is in <install-path>\<version>\Tools\tracing\i386. Make sure you copy the version of tracefmt.exe from the 64-bit or 32-bit directory!

The blogger above moved those files to the DTC folder %systemroot%\MsDtc\Trace, probably so they were in the msdtcvtr.bat path.

Answer 4

To save on downloading all of the WDK (600MB+), just for 200KB of files, I opted for a 4.7MB download by doing the following:

1. Download "Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools" from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=49AE8576-9BB9-4126-9761-BA8011FABF38&displaylang=en
2. If running from XP, just extract and go
3. If running from 2003 (like I am), you'll get an error saying this can only be installed on XP. So to get around this, use a tool to extract the exe instead.
4. Inside the exe will be a support.cab, extract the contents of this somewhere
5. Look for these two files, tracefmt.exe and traceprt.dll. Copy these to your %windir%\system32\msdtc\trace directory