Having problems with Visual Studio or .NET?

If you are having issues with Visual Studio or the .NET Framework, but you don't want to create a case with Microsoft Support, there is another option for you.

So first, if you are having a critical issue or need the issue looked at quickly to get to a resolution, Support is always the best avenue.  Take a look at this blog posting on how to submit a problem online: Contacting Tom...

But lets say you have a problem where you are developing your application and Visual Studio crashes, you don't want to investigate why it crashed, but you also would like to see something done about it.  For situations like these, you can create a bug report and file it to Microsoft using the Visual Studio & .NET Framework Product Feedback Center.

Note:  You can also find a link on that page to the publicly released hotfixes and also search through existing bugs to see if your problem has already been reported.  You can also submit suggestions if you have an improvement suggestion for the product.

The best information that you can send with your bug report is a crash dump.  There are a few ways to obtain one of these.  For example:

How to obtain crash dump in Visual Studio 2005
How to use the Userdump.exe tool to create a dump file
How to create a user-mode process dump file in Windows Vista

If you are having problems with other products from Microsoft, the Online Crash Analysis may be what you are looking for to troubleshoot the problem.