First and foremost, we hope that you will not see the "unhandled exception" dialog box of SharpDevelop often. Nevertheless I would like to shed light on some improvements in that area.

In spite of all error reporting features of an application, the best thing users can do to help us is to describe as precisely as possible what they were doing that eventually led to the error. However, SharpDevelop 3 now also outputs some additional information that may help with fixing the bugs. As of build 3.0.0.3455, two extensions to the exception reports created by SharpDevelop are in place and working:

The log message recorder permanently stores a number of internal log messages (currently up to 25) in a cyclic buffer. Those messages are then added to the report whenever an unhandled exception occurs. Here you can see the exception box with some log messages scrolled into view:

Additionally, some state information is added to the report. Currently the following items are listed:

• installed 3rd party add-ins
• type and name of the current project
• name and some properties of the current solution
• active view content

Please note that the new exception reports can contain information which you might want to keep private. For example, names of projects, files, classes, methods etc. can appear in the log messages and state information, perhaps even parts of code that has been edited. If you are concerned about privacy, you should look through the generated report and check whether it contains anything you do not want to disclose before posting it. Feel free to anonymize it as necessary, but please make sure that you do not change the "meaning" of the report - i.e. if you change a name, change all occurrences of that name equally.