Vista: WFP and WER

Tue, September 5, 2006, 02:49 PM under Windows | Vista
Three weeks ago I wrote a short overview article of Windows Feedback Platform (WFP), the evolution of Windows Error Reporting (WER). Those of you who are subscribed to the msdn flash newsletter will have (hopefully) read it already (published 17th August). Its title: "Code quality, customer feedback and application reliability with Windows Vista".

If you want to read an online version of it (or wish to subscribe to the essential msdn flash) please go here where we store the archives.

In the article, I mention the Application Recovery APIs that I covered on my blog: RegisterApplicationRestart and RegisterApplicationRecoveryCallback.

If you've read those posts, you may wish to demo the APIs without having to explain WER and the dialogs that get thrown (I was in such a situation recently). One thing we can do is turn off WER for your sample demo application. To do that we need to wrap WerAddExcludedApplication like this:
[DllImport("wer.dll")]
internal static extern uint WerAddExcludedApplication(string pwzExeName, bool bAllUsers);


...and then call it like this:
WerAddExcludedApplication(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName, false);

Of course, if you do leave WER enabled, remember to show that with Windows Vista it now works even for hangs (not just for crashes) :-)