One of the initiatives I’m involved with on the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams is the Tactical Test Team (TTT), which is a group of testers who dedicate a portion of their time to roaming around and testing different parts of the product.  What this generally translates to is a day and a bit a week helping out with areas of the product that have been flagged as risky, or tackling problems that span both ASP.NET and Visual Studio.  There is also a separate component of this effort outside of TTT which is to help with customer scenarios and design.

I enjoy being on TTT because it allows me the opportunity to look at the entire product and gain expertise in a wide range of areas.  This week, I’m looking at Visual Studio 2010 performance problems, and this gem with the keyboard in Visual Studio locking up ended up catching my attention.

First of all, here’s a link to one of the many Connect bugs describing the problem:

Microsoft Connect

I like this problem because it really highlights the challenges of reproducing customer bugs.  There aren’t any clear steps provided here, and I don’t know a lot about your environment: not just the basics like our OS version, but also what third party plug-ins or antivirus software you might be running that might contribute to the problem.  In this case, my gut tells me that there is more than one bug here, just by the sheer volume of reports.  Here’s another thread where users talk about it:

Microsoft Connect

The volume and different configurations are staggering.  From a customer perspective, this is a very clear cut case of basic functionality not working in the product, but from our perspective, it’s hard to find something reproducible: even customers don’t quite agree on what causes the problem (installing ReSharper seems to cause a problem…or does it?).

So this then, is the start of a QA investigation. If anybody has isolated repro steps (just comment on this post) that they can provide this will immensely help us nail down the issue(s), but I’ll be doing a multi-part series on my progress and methodologies as I look into the problem.