I need to design a bug alert system, where the web support team is notified via email when a user of our website encounters an error of any sort (database exception, or a 404)
What would be the best way to design this section of the project? Any ideas would be appreciated.
ASP.NET health monitoring may be of interest: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998306.aspx. It's really simpler to use than this article first appears and doesn't require any additional components - it's all built-in.
You may want to look into using the global.asax file for application-wide error intercepting. A quick search yields this step-by-step walk-through:
http://aspnetresources.com/articles/CustomErrorPages.aspx
Depending on the volume of traffic you're expecting, sending an e-mail every time an error is intercepted may not be the best approach. At best, you'd flood inboxes (and make the support staff very unhappy), and at worst you'd get your mail servers blacklisted for spamming. The approach that I've used in the past on high-traffic sites is to queue up errors in a table that is read and purged at a set interval by a separate process. The process would aggregate the errors, grouping them by type, number of occurrences, etc, then send out an e-mail report to the support mailing lists.
I would implement an HTTPmodule that captures the onError event.
This is would allow the module to be reused over multiple applications. The destination email addresses, SMTP server etc, could be in the HTTPmodule, overriden in the web.config file for maximum flexibility.