My experience on Connect Feedbacks

John Chen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:02:00 GMT

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.

Visual Studio Data : Connect

My experience on Connect Feedbacks