Not so much flowing as a small trickle, but the pipes have been opened.

Richard recently blogged that we should make bug reporting easy. I agree, so last night I released a new build of RikReader (1.4/2669) to make it so. There are three areas I've focused on.

1. Exception Reporting - In the past if RikReader raised an exception a handler dialog was displayed and the user had the option to "Copy" an exception report. I was occasionally sent these by blog comments, email, and IM. The next logical step was to enable a "Send Report" option that pushes the report directly to my server.

2. Feedback Reporting - Problems don't always raise exceptions. I wanted to make reporting general problems easy and to allow users to send feature requests. So the new build sports a brand new "Send Feedback" feature.

   "Send Feedback" pops up a dialog which lets the user annotate a screenshot of the application with ink, add some textual comments, and then push the report over to my server. Since we're dealing with a WPF app I can send vectors instead of pixels so these reports end up quite small (20-40kb).

   I first heard about the idea to attach annotated screenshots when Leon was interviewed about MicroISVs on Hanselminutes. I think a big problem with feature requests and problem reports is that even something simple can still require lots of back and forth communication with the user to find out what they really meant. With an annotated screenshot, if the user is feeling generous enough they can visually describe what they mean in a format which is much easier to convey.

3. Usage Reporting - I was greatly inspired by Joseph's efforts here. The current build has UI in place to enable and disable usage reporting. The implementation is just stubbed out but I'm looking forward to collecting lots of interesting metrics here.