Workshop: Letting us know where the crashes are.

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Bill Roth's Blog | May 7, 2007   9:25 AM | Comments (0)

Let's face it. Sometimes software crashes. We all get Null Pointer Exceptions, Blue Screens of Death, and Core Dumps. At BEA we recognize this, and are doing things inside of BEA Workshop in order to make sure we can deliver best quality software possible. In order to do this, I wanted to write about 2 start up options you can add to your .INI file in order to give us more information on how and where bad things happen in Workshop, so we can fix this.

First off, this is a part of our recent efforts to get more diagnostics so we can build a better product. Crashweb sends us info on any crashes that happen in the IDE, if you allow it to be sent. As an aside, we only accept info info that you agree to send us, as we have a specific opt-in policy.

That said, all you need to do is to add 2 lines to your  workshop4WP.ini file, which can generally be found in <installhome>\workshop_N.M\workshop4WP\. To tag your email to the crashes, just add these 2 lines to the .INI file

-DprodMode=preProduction
-Duser.name=uid@yourdomain.com

These options should go at the end of the .ini file, with the other “-D” system properties, or at least after the -vmargs line. It should be said that the only thing you get by adding -DprodMode=preProduction is that the username/email specified in the user.name property is sent with the crash report, if you leave the prodMode flag out you will still get the option to submit crashes anonymously.

We're also doing some things to track usage (if you opt-in) so we can improve the user interface. But more on that later.

(Special thanks to Jeremiah Johnson and Tom Stamm for reviewing early drafts of this blog).

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