Frans Bouma said:
You make one mistake: you already know the KB article. Most of the
time though, the KB article number isn't known and a user runs into a
problem. What to do? If its his fault, he will pay up, so better keep
low and accept it till a service pack is released...
Also remember that not all known bugs are publicly listed with KB
articles: often a KB article is made internally but not publicly
published until the service pack the patch is in is released.
As a user I always do some investigation before calling MS support or
someone else. I search in Google, MSDN KB, etc. As MVPs we can even search
in the KB for partners with more articles that the public KB, although
certainly it would be better to have access to the internal MS database with
all issues.
Most (or all) of the times I have found a KB article with the hotfix. And as
MVP we can also write KB articles (community solutions) to expose/document
bugs (without the hotfix), I have written more than 40 with bugs in the
extensibility model of VS.NET and some workarounds in the last couple of
years and they have helped to a lot of developers. At the very least, the
user will know that the problem is not his code...
--
Best regards,
Carlos J. Quintero
MZ-Tools: Productivity add-ins for Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio .NET,
VB6, VB5 and VBA
You can code, design and document much faster in VB.NET, C#, C++ or VJ#
Free resources for add-in developers:
http://www.mztools.com