Just occasionally, Microsoft seems to do something that's absolutely spot on. This time it has taken advantage of something that it has built up over years of experience with: dealing with error reports. The firm intends to release a better version of its Dr. Watson software that third party software providers can use. One of the biggest problems in deploying bespoke enterprise applications is knowing where and how things are going wrong so that they can be fixed. Application crashes can be a nightmare as the development team often just gets a few Post-It notes with "it keeps falling over" written on them.
Microsoft's solution is to let software developers have details on how to build Dr. Watson hooks into their applications. It might be extra work but the rewards will certainly come. If the modified application crashes, it can send full details of what went wrong to a central server. That should mean developers getting decent information about what is going wrong with code that has been deployed. It should also make the development cycle a bit easier as the QA process is likely to become far more accurate.
This is definitely a fine move on the part of Microsoft. There is no sign yet as to whether this is going to cost money or not. Even if it does, for anyone developing enterprise scale applications, it will almost certainly be worth it.
View: Aritcle @ the inq
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