Fabian GiesenOct 3, 2023
I just whined about this elsewhere, but this makes a good post, so:
1. a very good feature of default Win32 message boxes is that they implement Ctrl-C to copy the error message and window title into the clipboard (formatted and everything)
2. way too few people know this, and accordingly, custom message boxes basically never implement this
3. if you work on custom UI libraries that have some message box facility, you should!
Show threadajft [SEC=continvoucly morged]Oct 3, 2023
@rygorous so many times in a support role have I asked people to use this, and so many times do they ignore our request and screen grab the message box (or entire screen), paste that into a Word document, then email the Word document
Show threadAras PranckevičiusOct 3, 2023
@ajft @rygorous luxury! people these days film the screen with their phone, and send a video
Show threadMatteꙮ Italia
@aras @ajft @rygorous given that people just send us photos of errors via WhatsApp, I've seriously proposed to add a QR code with the relevant info in our main application error dialog (but TBF it's generally used on machines that may not have connectivity, so it's somehow understandable).
Oct 3, 2023 at 6:07amWeb
Show threadRiley S. FaelanOct 3, 2023

@cvtsi2sd The machines don't need connectivity. It's possible to encode an error message into a barcode entirely offline.

[email protected] @ajft @rygorous

Show threadAlexander The 1stOct 3, 2023

@riley @cvtsi2sd @ajft @rygorous I think they'd need to be pre-compiled though, since my first thought is; you want a program that hit an error/exception to not handle that, but instead generate an QR code while displaying an error message?

Is it possible? Probably - unless the error/exception it hit was an OutOfMemoryException, because then you won't have the memory to do that.

Show threadMatteꙮ ItaliaOct 3, 2023
@AT1ST @riley @ajft @rygorous if the program state is so fucked up it cannot manage to generate a QR code, probably it can't even display the error dialog; it's a thing that does happen from time to time, but it's a very small minority of errors (and that's why the error handler tries to handle the problem doing cleanup actions in order of increasing "risk of further crash" and decreasing importance). The cleanest thing would be to handle at least the reporting part from a fresh process, though.
Show threadRiley S. FaelanOct 3, 2023

@cvtsi2sd There's no reason why generating a QR code for an error code should require allocating new memory. If you want to really push it, it can even be done without using new stack frames (although, if you can call the system API that displays an error message, you can't be entirely out of stack space just yet).

@AT1ST @ajft @rygorous

Show threadMatteꙮ ItaliaOct 3, 2023
@riley @ajft @rygorous I think there's a misunderstanding, I was saying is that it's understandable that they send me WhatsApp photos of the screen instead of nice screenshots, because those machines generally don't have connectivity, so taking a picture with the phone is much faster for our technicians. QR code generation would be entirely in-app, it makes no sense to use a network service for that.