Revenge of the Automated IDE Incident reporting

Now that Delphi 8.02 is delivered and available, I can go ahead and publish what I'd been hinting at for the last couple of weeks. You can now download from Code Central a zip file containing the nessesary pieces to install the IDE incident reporting package. Included in this zip file are many .jdbg files that contain detailed symbol information for each Win32 binary that we build for the product. This information is used to correlate each entry in the stack trace to a specific line of code in a specific function, or as close as it can be. The exception and stack tracing code is included courtesy of the JEDI Code Library. You can visit them here, http://www.delphi-jedi.org for more information on this code. You'll also notice that several other run-time packages are included as well, dbrtl71.bpl, soaprtl71.bpl, dsnap71.bpl. These are included because this system uses the publically available Quality Central WebService. The WSDL can be found here: http://qc.borland.com/qc/coBugCGI.exe/wsdl/ICDSReportPublicInterface. As a matter of fact, anyone can create a client that talks to this service.

It has also been requested that I provide the source code to this IDE plug-in. I will certainly take that under advisment, however there are several places where this plug-in touches some deep internal pieces of the IDE. These will need to be cleaned up before any publishing can take place. One thing I can say is that this code is now an integral part of the normal Galileo IDE build process (which includes Delphi/Win32, Delphi for .NET, and C#Builder products). What this means is that during both field tests and future product releases there is a very good chance that this functionality will be included as part of the release, or at least provided as a separate install/download.

Now on to the installation of this feature:

Install Delphi 8 Update 2 first: http://www.borland.com/products/downloads/download_delphi_net.html
Download from this Code Central entry: http://codecentral.borland.com/codecentral/ccWeb.exe/listing?id=21547
Unzip the file into the "bin" directory of the Delphi 8 install. For example: c:\Program FilesBorlandBDS2.0Bin
Open RegEdit <normal registry editing warning and disclaimer inserted here>
Add the following value:

[HKCUSoftwareBorlandBDS2.0Known IDE Packages]
$(BDS)binexceptiondiag71.bpl = "(untitled)"

You can verify that it is installed correctly by opening Help|About. In the list box, there should be an entry called "Borland Quality Insite."

For once, this is a feature I certainly hope you never have to use.