Windows Error Reporting (WER) Web Service

I have long thought that one of the coolest features of the Windows OS for developers is the Windows Error Reporting infrastructure (with roots in Dr. Watson).  You can have your application upload dumps to the WinQual portal – https://winqual.microsoft.com.

One of the problems though has always been getting those dumps off of the WER site.  Before it was a manual process of going to the WinQual website and download CAB files.  Well I found out today that the WER team recently released a Web Service that allows you to pull them down automatically.   They have also released some sample applications to get you started:

Windows Error Reporting on CodePlex - https://www.codeplex.com/wer

This opens up all sorts of possibilities such as automatically creating bugs in your bug DB (TFS hopefully!) in response to a new dump file getting uploaded so that someone on your team can take a look.

Finally the WER team has a blog up and running (https://blogs.msdn.com/wer) and their first entry discusses this and has some demo videos from PDC:

https://blogs.msdn.com/wer/archive/2008/11/25/windows-error-reporting-wer-blog.aspx

Enjoy!

Zach