Nontrivial Exercises

Microsoftmoric Error Reporting

I have to use a windows pc at work. I bring my Mac along to work for comfort and to actually do stuff when I need to.

I’ve started using Skitch on my Mac last week (thanks for the invite, Blake) and love it. It’s only a Mac app, though, so I’ve tried using Jing from TechSmith for windows. The Jing Project has some of the same aspirations as Skitch, but is not quite as snazzy.

One of the most unsnazzy things about Jing is that it simply crashes on my windows pc. It requires .NET 3.0, which I installed last week. I opened a support request with TechSmith, who were very responsive. They suggested I uninstall .NET 3.0 and .NET 2.0, then reinstall them.

How Microsoftmoric - just uninstall and reinstall. Just restart. Just kick it hard. Then maybe it will work.

Well, it worked for a few days, now it’s just crashing every time I start it up again.

The crazy thing is that the Microsoft error reporting dialog comes up, and it offers to show me what the error report contains. This would be the debug info that the Jing support people could use to actually help debug this problem. Hmmm, this could be useful.

The nice error reporting dialog will show me the debug info in a small little window, but I can’t select it or copy it. It’s just there and then goes off to some database in Redmond somewhere.

After some digging, I found where it writes the actual error / debug file. However, the DW20.exe process locks that dump (.dmp) file during the error reporting and prevents me from opening it or copying it to actually get at the data. After it send the report to Redmond, it then deletes the file.

How incredibly dumb and frustrating. Microsoft won’t let me get at my own debug data when something goes wrong.

The Microsoft help pages don’t. The only idea I came up with is to manually kill the DW20.exe process in the middle of the error report, which unlocks the .dmp file. The .dmp file is either encrypted, though, or encoded in binary because I can’t read it in notepad.

I did open a new support requrest with TechSmith and give them this error file. Hopefully they have some developer magic to read this file.

It’s experiences like this that prove that Microsoft doesn’t put the user experience first in their design. That’s why people love Apple - they are focused on the user experience. And that’s why using a PC and dealing with Mircrosoftic idiosyncracies can be so frustrating.

Interestingly, my complaint here is about Microsoft, not Jing, even though Jing is the application that is crashing. When you have a platform that is untrustworthy and unfriendly, users direct their frustration at it more than at the stuff that doesn’t work on top of it.

Apple certainly isn’t perfect, but at least I can get debug data when something goes wrong.

Tags: microsoft, error reporting, user experience, microsoftmoric, jing, jingproject, apple