Questions and answers

I have been asked a few questions about things that I mentioned in my blogs and I thought that I would share the answers.

 

The first question came from one of my colleagues, Akos.

"Why didn't you mention the engineers in Budapest when you were listing the Microsoft site?"

The honest answer is that I forgot. We recently opened an office in Budapest and now quite a lot of our developer support for Europe is done there. This makes a lot of sense economically and technically; the reasons are linked. The cost of living in Hungary is low which means that we can hire excellent engineers without breaking the bank. Developer support staff are rather odd fish by definition. They have to have the skills of a developer but they also have to have good communications skills. Ideally, they should speak multiple languages and need at least some understanding of different cultures. These are rather odd combinations of skills and it is difficult to get people who have a passion for programming to work in a non-programming role. We have managed to do this very successfully in Hungary, Egypt and Turkey and added useful language skills as we now have engineers who can work in Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian and a number of other languages spoken in the former soviet union.

 

Another question that I was asked was whether I would be discussing ways of avoiding needing to debug. I am very happy to do so but I can't equal the splendid work that John Robbins has already done in this area. If anyone has a specific area that they would like me to discuss then there is a contact button just above this post. I would be pleased to hear from you.

 

One of my readers, Alan, asked how we handled dumps when they had been captured.

We work a lot with full minidumps. One thing that is confusing is
that Kernel mode guys call all of the user mode dumps minidumps since
each dump is only one process. The mini-mini dumps are not a lot of use
unless you also have a bigger user mode dump to compare addresses with.

Some of the .NET ones get pretty big - 1.4 GB for 2 GB mode and 2.2 for
3 GB. We see a lot of those when the customer has somehow managed to
block the finalizer and the GC doesn't do much. We have a secure file
share solution where a customer can upload multi-GB files. There live on
an area that is private to that one user and it is all done over https
to avoid firewall nightmares. It is then replicated on to an internal
(and secure) file share. Customer data is precious so we don't leave it
lying around.

To clarify, a mini-mini dump is what you would get if you used the WinDbg command ".dump /mdi"

 

I was also asked (on a newsgroup for visually impaired developers) about the automatic diagnostic information that we gather when people send error information to us with Windows Error Reporting. This is an interesting topic and one that some people are concerned about so I will address that in my next blog.

 

Finally (for today), a question that my boss asked me. "How many people read your blog?".

The honest answers is that I don't know. I get about 250 direct hits for each post and perhaps another 900 syndicated hits. Some people will read a few lines and move on. Some will read. If you have got this far, then you are one of the readers and for that, I thank you

Signing off

Mark

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2005
  Awesome blog. Keep it coming, Keep it real ;-)
• Anonymous
  August 26, 2005
  Glad that you are enjoying it. Is there anything in particular that you would like to see me ruminate on?