WPF - What information to capture when handling unhandled exceptions?

Question

I am developing an application in WPF / .Net 3.5 that will be available for download on the internet. I am - to the best of my ability - writing bug free code, and using exceptions only where necessary. However my experience with software development has shown that users always manage to do something strange which causes an exception to be thrown in a way you could never imagined possible. I would like to gather additional information when I have to catch an unhandled exception. So far I am capturing the following:

• Standard Exception fields (message, type, stacktrace etc)
• OS Version
• .Net version
• Versions of the Applications DLLs loaded into the AppDomain
• App licence information
• Instrumentation of the last few commands executed by the user.

I am very concious that I do not want to capture any 'personal' information about the user as I just don't believe in that sort of thing. Hence not bothering with the username/domain/ip address (although as the exception information is delivered to a webservice I will inherently get ip information but it may be of a proxy machine).

My Question

Anyone who has released an application into the public domain (i.e. onto computers not in a controlled corporate environment) - can you suggest anything else that would be useful in tracking down the causes of errors?

Particularly I do not want to collect information that I cannot manage/code for - I.e. the amount of memory available on the PC, or type of printers attached - These things are handled by the .net framework and I shouldn't really (read: don't want to) have to alter my code to cope with the variations out there!

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think that should be enough. You have information about the environment, what the user was trying to do, and one of the most important debugging tools: the stack trace.

Unless you are talking about a printer management application or something, then printer information would not be worth it.

There is always that remote chance that you will encounter an error that results from a strange combination of hardware, running services, installed applications and moon phase. I don't think it is worth to rabidly collect information about the user environment just to deal with those rare errors.

Just remember to have a way that you can be contacted for bug reports, in case a user really needs his particular problem fixed, so that he can provide more information about it and help you reproduce it. Depending on your target audience you have to decide between something like a bug tracker or a simple e-mail address.