Testing your Wizard files, Gather steps, customsettings.ini, etc

As you might have read already on other Blogs as well, it is quite easy to test the processing of your gather step and the customsettings.ini. What I would like to add here is, that you can also use the same way to test your custom wizards and scripts as well.

It’s easy to set up:

1. Create a folder that you would like to use for Testing/Debug purposes (“MDT_Testing” or similar). You can also create several folders if you require to test different scenarios
2. Copy the following files from the {MDTInstallationDirectoy}TemplatesDistributionScripts directory (or from your ConfigMgr MDT scripts package
   • ZTIGather.wsf
   • ZTIGather.xml
   • ZTIUtility.vbs
   • ZTIDataAccess.vbs
   • (all other scripts you are referencing)
     If you also want to test wizard panes based on the MDT Wizard you would need the additional following files
   • Wizard.hta
   • Wizard.css
   • Wizard.ico
   • WizUtility.vbs
   • BackButton.jpg
3. Copy all the files that you have changed or written into this folder (Your scripts, the customsettings.ini, the wizard xml files, etc)

Now you can run the ZTIGather.wsf script to test your gather step/customsettings.ini rules (e.g. with “cscript ZTIGather.wsf /debug:true”), run your custom scripts, your custom wizard, etc. All logging will happen to the C:MININTSMSOSDOSDLOGS folder. As this folder also contains the variables.dat file (that is the file storing all the current properties to survive reboots) it’s recommend deleting this folder every time before you run a test to avoid side-effects. If you need to run your test a couple times just save yourself some time and hassle and create a short batch file for this.

Each script will write to it’s own log file that has the same name as the script itself. And they should also all write to the BDD.Log file. So that this log contains a summary of all what is happening. These log files are written in a format best viewed with Trace32 from the ConfigMgr 2007 Toolkit (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=948e477e-fd3b-4a09-9015-141683c7ad5f&DisplayLang=en).

Finally some links that might help you if you experience problems during your tests:

Debugging VBScript and JScript in vbs, js, wsf and hta files

Ben Hunter: Understanding BDD/MDT Rule processing

Ben Hunter: Troubleshooting BDD/MDT Database issues

The Deployment Guys: MDT Debugger

Xtreme Deployment: Writing custom scripts with MDT 2010

Xtreme Deployment: Getting debug information in Client Scripts

and many, many more. If you have a link that you found helpful on troubleshooting just sent it to me and I will publish it to this blog.