Pulling exception out of its users

Question

What is your best solution for pulling out exception occuring on a user computer? For example I send automatically a email when an exception is thrown which body contains the call stack. Have you experience other quick way to handle user bug?

Answer 1

BugzScout with FogBugz worked wonders for me. An API to your bug database in general is the way to go.

With respect to emailing it, you can simulate some of the features of a bug tracking database but it's not as good as the real thing. If you keep with the email option, be sure to send them to a generic [email protected] email instead of a personal so they can be routed to a different person quickly if necessary.

Answer 2

Unless this is a corporate app, be sure to ask the user if they want to submit anything first.

Then, generally I would recommend submitting it via web service. Better to leverage the end-user's existing proxy settings if any.

Answer 3

ELMAH is a good tool for logging exceptions in ASP.NET websites - it can log the exception to a local database as well as emailing it.

"Once ELMAH has been dropped into a running web application and configured appropriately, you get the following facilities without changing a single line of your code: Logging of nearly all unhandled exceptions.

• A web page to remotely view the entire log of recoded exceptions.
• A web page to remotely view the full details of any one logged exception.
• In many cases, you can review the original yellow screen of death that
  ASP.NET generated for a given
  exception, even with customErrors
  mode turned off.
• An e-mail notification of each error at the time it occurs. An RSS feed of the last 15 errors from the log."