My experience on Connect Feedbacks

Recently I have been working with some Visual Studio feedbacks reported through Microsoft Connect. I found that some feedbacks may contain multiple unrelated issues. On the other hand, one issue may be reported several times by the same person in different feedbacks. There are also issues about crashing, memory, performance, debugging, etc. I will share some tips here that I think can benefit both Microsoft and our customers.

1. Report only one issue in one feedback. As you may know that there are many teams working for Visual Studio and Dot Net framework. Different issues are more likely handled by different teams, product units or even divisions. Multiple issues in one feedback will be hard to track and individual issues may not be routed to the right team promptly.

2. Do come back to check the feedback often. We may often ask for detail repro information in order to reproduce the issue. If the issue has been resolved as not repro but you have more info, don’t worry or get angry, just reactivate the issue and adding the new information. Some customers tend to open new feedbacks in this case. I think stick to the old issue and continue the communication would be a better approach. Of course, if the time span is too long, a new issue is appropriate.

3. When a crashing occurs and you see the dialog asking you to send the feedback, click the send button. This will send the important crashing information (like call stack) to Microsoft and the information will be analyzed.

4. If you have issues regarding crashes, hangs, slowness, or out of memory errors, you can collect the information with the performance diagnostic tool available here (you need to log in as a connect user first).

5. If you want to use the VS debugger to get a call stack or dump file of an exception of VS, you can do so with a second instance of Visual Studio, see the post I have here .

Hope this helps.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
  Looks like the Connect Feedback doesn't contain comments on MSDN document.

• Anonymous
  June 10, 2009
  Let me guess. You closed feedbacks with info like this: "We will investigate this feature in later version. Now it's to late" and they will be completly abandoned. That's just my impression of how MS is handling feedbacks. See example: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=90732

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2009
  I have seen a lot of comments from Microsoft employees saying "I am closing this issue but feel free to reactivate it if you have more information." However, you should be aware that the Connect website changed fairly recently so that "Closed" issues cannot be reactivated by the user that reported them. The only option is to create a new ticket. It seems that the Connect website team made this change without notifying any of the teams that use the site, because I still very often see those kinds of comments. Imagine how frustrating it is for users to not only have their reported bug or suggestion be closed outright with little or no discussion, but then to be told to do something that they can't do!

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2009
  I understand your concern. First is that product team will try their best to reproduce the issue and sometimes due to complex configuration of user's environment, it's hard for product team to reproduce, thus cannot investigate not to mention fix the issue. If product team still fails to do anything about the issue, the bug will be closed. You're right that currently user cannot reactivate the bug. However there's a team keeping an eye on all the comments, so if a user could provide more information (might not be the original creator of the bug) in the comment, the team will help reactivate the bug and assign it to the right product team. Oh, and the connect team is considering adding the feature to enable user directly reactivate a bug.

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2009
  Good news: The re-activations scenario in Connect Visual Studio has already been enabled recently.