Reporting a Visual Studio crash to Microsoft

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Background

Sometimes Visual Studio crashes. It would be nice if this wasn’t the case, but unfortunately it happens. However, like many Microsoft applications, Visual Studio has Error Reporting so that when a problem happens, you can tell us about it in one click. However, sometimes you would like to actually tell a live human about your crash. There are a number of advantages to doing so:

  1. A human might be able to tell you about a work around that Windows Error reporting doesn’t know about.
  2. A human can tell you if this crash was something that we could diagnose.
  3. It helps to make sure your issue is really fixed. When a developer at Microsoft looks at a Windows Error report, all we see is where the crash happened and some local variables. Sometimes we can figure out what was happening and create a repro to confirm our fix. This is the best case, but it often doesn’t happen this way. More often we need to either guess what a fix is but not test the fix, or we are unable to even guess what a correct fix might be.

For these reasons you might want to also report the issue through the Visual Studio product feedback center.

What to do

Step #1: Go to https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=210 and enter a bug.

Step #2: In the bug, include the ‘bucketing information’. You can find this information by:

  • Open the event viewer (Right click on Computer and go to ‘Manage’; click on the ‘Event Viewer’ tree item).
  • Open the ‘Application’ section
  • Look for the entry that happened about the correct time and had the source set to ‘Application Error’
  • Copy the content and paste it into the bug, it should look something like:

Faulting application devenv.exe, version 9.0.30428.1, time stamp 0x4815597f, faulting module scriptle2.dll, version 9.0.21022.8, time stamp 0x47317e18, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0000328c, process id 0xfbc, application start time 0x01c8bc39887cac69.