A problem has occurred, would you like to send this data to Microsoft?
I'm watching the current Tech-Ed session on the new additions to the debugger to help simplify understanding what's going on when debugging complicated applications/structures.
Everything was going great, and then BOOM VS fell flat on it's face. Not a very uncommon event at Tech-Ed since we are using bleeding edge alpha bits to demo the latest stuff we are doing. Scott recovered great, with a lot of humor, however he dismissed the dialog saying "would you like to send this report to MS". Habib, noticed this and mentioned "We're not connected to the network right now, however, if this happens to you please send us this information."
I can't express how right he is. No matter how much time and effort we spend in testing and QA on our products, bugs still happen and things will not always behave properly. We take all of these problems very seriously and consider things like crashes, hangs, and data corruption/loss to be critical problems that must be addressed ASAP. However, if the crash only happens on your machine then we might never know about it.
The system that detects crashes and uploads it to MS is called Watson and you can read about it here. These crashes do get to us devs and we do analyse them and fix the problems. (It's really sucky to do since it's usually working on extremely optimized code, and i hate X86 assembly, but it usually ends up revealing some very hard to find bug that only occurs under a very specific set of circumstances).
I've talked to many people who tell me they don't send the information because they don't think it does any good or gets looked at by anybody. I just want to let you know that that most definitly is not the case. If there are any reasons you don't use the crash reporting system, please let us know why!
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Update: John pointed me to this page: https://winqual.microsoft.com/default.aspx where ISVs can sign up and get that crash report data. Interesting stuff. Thanks John
Comments
- Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
It'd be nice if the vendors of the products could specify that bug reports for this application should be sent to them. Most of the time I dismiss the dialogs because I consider it to be a problem with the application or hardware, and not Windows XP. - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
I have a laptop with crash reporting enabled but sometimes that machine is not connected to a network. It would be really smart if the reporting tool was able to store and batch the transmissions. It would also be really nice to have the tool give some basic reporting feedback to the user. One of the reasons many people have the perception that the reporting is useless is because they don't see anything tangile back. A basic reporting interface might solve that. - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
So I always click 'send' and it gets annoying to do so every time the dialog appears. Especially as a dev & trainer, I get this dialog frequently and really wish it would simply send each time without adding yet another dialog. Many dialogs have a "an always apply this setting" and this is much needed. People who do click yes, usually do for all products. For simplicity, there shouldn't even be a dialog, but a little pop up or icon in the system tray like updates, new hardware, etc. Please pass this on! - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
Brian: You raise a very good point. I don't know how MS deals with crashes in non-MS products. I also don't know if Watson is available for use with other software vendors. I'll try to get this information for you. - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
Kevin: I believe that one of the features of watson is that it can queue up dumps to be uploaded at a time when the network becomes available. However, i believe (but could be very wrong) that apps have to inform watson that that is ok). I'm working with Anson (our PM) to make it so that VS 2005 will have this behavior and I will try to get more information on this. - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
Stefan: I understand your concern. Your private data is just that, private. The only thing I can say is that you should read our privacy policy to see if that alleviates your worries. - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
May 28, 2004
Cyrus: What I meant by popup (which I agree is frequently ignored) was simply an indication that a bug report was being sent to Microsoft after the user has already selected an option to always send reports. The simple fact that delivery was taking place is the issue, the vehicle is trivial. What I'm looking for is an option as with Windows Updates to always download updates meets WinXP SP2 where updates are automatically applied as well ... the option to avoid human interaction. - Anonymous
May 29, 2004
We want to fix your crashes. - Anonymous
May 30, 2004
Brian and Cyrus: I work for an ISV, not Microsoft, and I have arranged to get access to my company's crash reports through http://winqual.microsoft.com . So do, by all means, send crash reports for applications. - Anonymous
May 31, 2004
John,
Well that answers that question! Thanks, I will definitely begin sending them in again.
Brian - Anonymous
June 02, 2004
I'm curious how Microsoft devs can sort out what crashs are caused by bad hardware setups (ie. bad RAM, bad bios setup, etc), a poorly programmed piece of software, or a problem with the OS. Last week I was testing software that crashed my machine, submitted the dump and it stated that it was a driver issue, but I know is was this software's bug... - Anonymous
June 02, 2004
William: Great question. I can even think of a simpler case:
What does a dev do when there is a problem due to memory corruption? Any random thread in the program could have corrupted the memory and we're only crashing when our code hits the corruption.
This is where the statistical properties of watson come into play. Watson collects dumps and automatically processes several properties automatically (but I'm not sure what I can talk about).
So if we have one crash on one machine in the entire world, we might not fix the issue because we're not necessarily what casued the crash. However, if we have 5, or 10, (or more if the bug is particularly bad) we have all sorts of techniques of diagnosing, repro-ing and resolving the issue. - Anonymous
June 02, 2004
William: Mikhail talks about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2004/06/01/146169.aspx - Anonymous
June 03, 2004
If any of you Microsofties knows how to get in touch with Jason Hardester, could you remind him that his slide deck for WINC08 - Corporate Error Reporting still hasn't shown up on CommNet? Thanks... - Anonymous
June 04, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 04, 2004
Get well soon, ********. - Anonymous
June 15, 2004
I hate to be a pest, but the slides are still not there. http://www.msteched.com/TechEdSlides.aspx - Anonymous
June 16, 2004
John. Not a problem. I'll look into it :-) - Anonymous
June 16, 2004
Honestly, while I'll often send in the crash information, if I'm in the middle of doing something, I'll often decide not to, particularly if this program has a habit of crashing, if I'm in the middle of something because it tends to slow the computer and almost inevitably, I just get a message saying that Microsoft suspects that the program caused the crash. Although I did appreciate the occasional candid message that said that the fault was caused by Microsoft Windows and that I should contact the manufacturer for updated software. - Anonymous
June 09, 2005
When a Windows program crashes, Windows XP gives you the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. The process is called Online Crash Analysis. My advice: Do it. Here's a perfect example of why it's good for you and for your fellow PC users. For years, I've encountered a sporadic... - Anonymous
June 16, 2009
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