Access 2007 Beta 2 Misconception #3 - Somebody else will report this bug

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This is something that I have been guilty of in a number of ocasions. If you run into any bugs or issues when using any pre-release (and to some extent, even released) software, make sure you report them to the manufacturer. Do not expect it to get reported by somebody else.

For example, if you try your existing Access solution with Access 2007 Beta 2 and you see errors where you didn't before or missing data, please contact Microsoft (preferably through the Beta channels - because you will then likely get feedback on the progress of the issue, etc). Do not assume that the Access Team knows that issue or that somebody else reported it already.

Do send us feedback even for issues that seem brain dead, such as an error during boot or such. I say that because bugs that seem 100% reproducible in one machine sometimes are only reproducable in that machine. This is particularly the case for racing condition and configuration bugs.

As an example, a long time ago I saw a very weird memory issue (causing a crash in a server app) when using only a specific machine made by a specific manufacturer with a specific brand of memory. Since this was a prototype loaned to us from a hardware company, we dug deep to figure out if it was a hardware issue or something software-related - this was no joke since the machine costed upwards of $50,000 a piece and had some new custom hardware for some new memory-related functionality. After a couple of *months* of investigation - with this machine being the sole known affected hardware - it ended up being a software bug. Of course, once the problem was figured out, it started being seen on other machines.

Also very useful for us, especially for Service Packs, is the Error Reporting in Windows (also known as Watson Crash Reports). Contrary to what most people think, there are very strict privacy policies in place, and these are very useful for us to address customer issues, which frequently we don't know of until we get these reports.