This was a project that I headed-up while working at MGI Software and it's been long abandonded. I am greatful to have worked on this project and what I learned about Windows internal and debugging support has enriced me, I am thankful to my Team Lead for letting me own this project from start to finish!

Background:
Blue screens of death, crashes, hangs and abnormal program behavior. This is what the developer has to content with. Hopefully, if the developer does his job right, the customer purchasing the software will not have to put up with buggy software. Should a customer encounter a bug, we should not expect the customer to have a knowledgeable understanding of the software problem, or it's cause.

A scenario might have a customer calling support about a problem with their application. The support personal asks, "how can I help you?" The customer replies with an unqualified, "I don't know what's wrong with my computer. But, when I click on the Play button the program crashes."

So the assistance asks a list of questions to help resolve the matter:

1. Manufacture of PC
2. RAM and HD Space
3. Make and model of CPU
4. Product's name and version
5. What type of video-card do you have
6. etc...

Making it easier:
Automating some of the steps in diagnosing the software would result in saving time and money. It would also be very beneficial to the developer to have more information to work with when isolating and fixing a problem. For the Q/A, the diagnostic report takes the guess work out of determining which code module caused the error. This saves time in assigning the issue to the correct developer.

For example, the picture below shows you the possible ways the "Play" operation can fail. Without the Diagnostic Server, a developer can expect to spend a long time in locating the cause of the problem.

The Diagnostic Server makes it clear to the developer where the problem occurred, and is most cases what the problem is. When it comes to software maintenance, the Diagnostic Server supports the software lifecycle. Throughout each stage of the project, the Diagnostic Server is there to support the developer.

Helping the Developer
If you're a developer who's just declared war on software bugs! Then, the Diagnostic Server is your best ally in the combat against software defects. It's a good way to improve the quality of your software development process. With this tool, your application can log trace messages and report errors. It aids the developer to: monitor multiple processes, track memory access, detects memory leaks, help monitor multi-threaded application and determine thread deadlocks. Also, it reports exceptions caused by null pointer access or divide by zero, for example. Furthermore, the developer can choose to do remote debugging by having the Diagnostic Server run on one PC and the application run on a different PC.

The Diagnostic Server work's with both debug and release builds. It's in the debug builds where the developer gets the most power. There is still much support in the release build, such as thread monitoring, deadlock detection and OS exception reporting.

The Diagnostic Report:
A list of, some of the things the diagnostic report will provide:

• Client's CPU make & model
• OS Name and version
• Loaded modules(DLL) the app is dependent on
• Pre/Post memory snap shot
• Hardware snapshot (under consideration)
• Test application's name and version
• One or more diagnostic message
• Thread lifetime { creation, termination }
• DLL Module lifetime { loading, unloading }
• Thread state { active, suspended, blocked }
• Memory access {malloc/new, realloc, free/delete }
• Notification of any memory leak when the app ends
• COM and ActiveX lifetime { creation, destruction }

Each diagnostic message will contain the following information for the developer to work with:

1. Message Time stamp (Date & Time)
2. Process ID
3. Thread ID
4. Error Category ID
5. Error Code
6. File name and line number of message/error
7. Message priority level
8. User defined ID, useful for tracking instances
9. User defined Trace/Error message string

Last Updated: April 14, 2000