Kirk Glerum and Mike Hollinshead - Watson (what happens when your system crashes?)

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Sep 20th, 2005 @ 6:56 PM

What happens when an application crashes? Watson collects data and lets users send that in to Microsoft for analysis. Here you get to meet Kirk and Mike, two of the guys on that team and they talk about changes coming in Windows Vista.

Tags: PDC05, Software Testing, Windows Vista

Rating:

Views (38,827)

Comments (11)

Downloads

dantheman82

My single-most hated program on Windows XP and earlier. If only there were an easier way to kill it...because the crash analysis was anywhere between useless and exacerbating the problem.

Interestingly, with stuff like C9 and the Mini-Microsoft blog, I get a better view into MS than I've had in a long time. Oh, and for the record, Scoble and others in C9, apparently all internal emails from BillG and SteveB and such are passed along to Google, so there you go for transparency. This according to the following quote from a Mini-Microsoft blog comment: "I got the re-org email this morning, although I work at google, one of our insiders @ MS sent us a copy, we made some xerox copies of it and stamped them to several walls around our dept, really fun."

Nothing against JimAll, but he should have left before Vista ships...great technical understanding but little to no business sense.

tornblad
Evil Genious

I've managed to solve lots of bugs and crashes from the simplest of Watson dumps in the past - even on NT4. Being able to see a thread-by-thread stack trace and some of the heap is enough most of the time, if you know what you're doing.

At my current job, we've just realized that practically all our COTS apps have crash dumps available at winqual... We solved one nasty little bugger just the other week because of the Watson team.

I'm in utter awe!

Smiley

nektar

What I want to know is what information is collected with the Customer Experience Improvement Program as well. Programs like Office 2003, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger include an option for the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This option when selected sends anonymous information to Microsoft about the usage of that particular application. What we do not know is what kind of information is sent to Microsoft. We want more info on that. So please interview the Customer Experience Improvement people.

Manip

Now I know who to blame when Dr.Watson crashes on me. Mad

TomasDeml
Run Chiro, Run!

nektar wrote:

What I want to know is what information is collected with the Customer Experience Improvement Program as well. Programs like Office 2003, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger include an option for the Customer Experience Improvement Program. This option when selected sends anonymous information to Microsoft about the usage of that particular application. What we do not know is what kind of information is sent to Microsoft. We want more info on that. So please interview the Customer Experience Improvement people.

http://www.microsoft.com/products/ceip/

amotif
No Silver Bullet

So, what's the managed app story? Can managed apps participate? Can they anticipate fully?

extra credit: What about obfuscated managed apps?

prabhupr

Sincerely I don't know why the name "Dr. Watson", can somebody please explain me?

prabhupr

Can you guys leverage that tool such that it can be used as a generic tool for all the un-managed code applications?

Smile
Smile?

prabhupr wrote:

Sincerely I don't know why the name "Dr. Watson", can somebody please explain me?

You can get the idea why the name "Dr. Watson" from the previous link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/08/10/449866.aspx