What is the best way to get support from microsoft developers

Question

I have a problem at my production web, that I am not able to solve. I am not able to reproduce the problem in stage or development. It only appears when the website is under heavy load.

I think it is solvable if somebody who has a very good understanding of the internals of FormsAuthentication would have a look at it by logging into our system. It should be at least Scottgu!

Somebody told me that Microsoft Premier Support is a good choice for this kind of problems. We have no MSDN subscription or other connection to microsoft that enables us to use MPS.

Is there a way to get support on a incident base? Are there other ways to get this kind of support?

EDIT Here is the problem itself: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2448720/different-users-get-the-same-cookie-value-in-aspxanonymous

Answer 1

This page has the phone numbers for support incidents. I imagine you might be able to give them a credit card number if you are not an MDSN subscriber. Surely they would be able to route you appropriately to help you spend money with their support team.

Answer 2

Microsoft Advanced Support

$259-$515/incident.

Answer 3

Can you post the stack trace? I would start by trying to solve it on your own. Try using a web stress tool such as the free WCAT IIS tool from Microsoft to try and replicate the traffic.

Answer 4

Try reproducing it first. I've had good experience with WAPT for load testing. If you do call MS support be prepared to spend a long time on this. It is possible to get to people who are very knowledgeable but they are about 3-4 layers down (or up?) from where you start the call. If it is authentication issue authdiag (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e90fe777-4a21-4066-bd22-b931f7572e9a&DisplayLang=en) might help.