How to check windows error reports?

Question

My company is involved in Windows Error Reporting through Winqual. We would like to add some additional data to our crash reports using WERRegisterMemoryBlock. Obviously, we would like to make sure that this works before we ship our next version. How can we test this?

Is there a way to locally preview what will be sent? Does this really reproduce what we are going to extract from Winqual? A.

Alternatively, can we generate a real report from the development machine and then retrieve the report from Winqual? How can we distinguish this test case from the rest of our Winqual data? A.

Answer 1

[...] can we generate a real report from the developer's machine, then a report from Winqual? A.

• create a special test version of your application.
• Download the product mapping for this test version in WER
• test version crashes on machine with error message enabled
• check Winqual, a report should appear in a couple of days
• if the report does not already have CAB data, enable an additional data request (in Winqual)
• disable the test version again on the computer with the error message enabled
• check Winqual, in a couple of days a report with CAB data should be waiting for you.
• download the CAB data and check if it contains / what you need (you will need to use WinDbg to get the full image, VS is not as thorough as minidumps like WinDbg)

How would we distinguish this test case from the rest of our Winqual data?

• give the test version a special name and version (EXE name and * .rc)
• just using a different “product name” and “product version” (= friendly WER names) is not enough to get an extra event id / bucket, but an extra EXE name and a “product name” for matching applications should do the trick

Answer 2

The best criterion is to match the test version of your product. You can verify that the expected information is present, and then verify that you have changed the version and downloaded the new product mapping file before submitting