Using WER (Windows Error Reporting) tool to collect minidumps of our programs

Question

In some projects I have used MiniDump generation functions to generate dumps.

• Creating a MiniDump of a running process
• How to create minidump for my process when it crashes?

It is possible to generate these dumps and copy them from the machine to some development/test machines and analyze.

When a program fails at Windows a form is shown stating that would you want to submit the crash information. It is also possible to add some functions to our code to enable this feature.

However the dumps will be sent to Watson servers of Microsoft?

I wonder if it can be possible to write these WER enabling functions in our code and update CorporateWERServer property to make the bugs be forwarded to our servers instead of Microsoft.

• WER Reference

So we might be automatically informed when our applications crash, using an already implemented feature of Microsoft. Furthermore, is there a similar utility available for Linux side for programmers to use for such situations.

Answer 1

I've used both mechanisms. I started out "rolling my own" crash reporting system by reading articles on how to write my own unhandled exception filter. I even had the process collect additional files that were helpful in diagnosing the problem. The results were zipped up and http'd to a company server. WER has some advantages over rolling your own solution (eg. collection of crash dumps for you, statistical analysis, automated responses, etc.), so, my company decided to give it a try. We've been using WER for a few years and have had some success and failures. The WER support is pretty terrible. And we can no longer get the additional files as part of our crash report. So, we've decided to look for an alternative solution. There aren't many, but, we did find BugSplat and were pretty impressed. The moral of the story is make sure you know what you expect from such a system before deciding one way or the other.