After 600 downloads of Poker Copilot, I received my first support request. Although I've made Poker Copilot as bullet-proof as I can, there's going to be some cases where things just don't work, and this was one of them. As I started asking the user some questions in an e-mail to-and-fro, I realised:
- this is a painful way to solve a problem, for me and especially for the user
- this is going to happen often as more people download and install Poker Copilot
Now I've added a simple console to which a continual flow of helpful information is dumped. For example, the files being parsed, the number of games found in each file, any parsing problems encountered, unsupported game types found, and so on. This console is normally hidden from view. To show it I've added a new menu item: Window -> Console. When the user has a problem, I can now ask them to copy the contents of the console into an e-mail and send it to me.
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1 comments:
I do a similar thing with Entrian Source Search, using log4net. It keeps a detailed in-memory log of what it's doing, limited to the most recent hundred events, then if it crashes it includes the log in the crash dump.
It's great for understanding the context that led up to a crash - often the stack trace alone isn't enough.
The user can also choose to write the log to a file, and control the detail level, so I can use it for diagnosing non-crash problems.
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