Where do I get tracefmt.exe? And how do I read my MSDTC traces?

Question

I followed the KB article from MS in order to turn on MSDTC trace. Unfortunately it was hard to follow, since it doesn't assume a very reasonable and obvious expectation of the reader, specifically "how do I read this binary log file?" I read this page from MSDN as well, where I find that I can't read the log file because I'm missing some executable called tracefmt.exe, and I'm apparently the only one anywhere with this problem.

Hence my question: 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

With Visual Studio 2010 installed, I found the tool in the following location:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\x64\TraceFmt.exe

I then copied the .EXE to the following location:

C:\Windows\System32\Msdtc\Trace

And ran it as follows:

TraceFmt.exe dtctrace.log.2012-06-13-10-38-57-0601-00

Although most of the time I use msdtcvtr.bat, as follows:

C:\Windows\System32\Msdtc\Trace\msdtcvtr.bat -tracelog dtctrace.log.2012-06-13-10-38-57-0601-00