I would like my program to email me a bug-report when it fails. Is there any way of doing this… safely? I have found I can use System.Net.Mail MailMessage and SmtpClient and such, but of course, I will have to provide a username and a password to it (unless someone knows of one that doesn’t need it?). And putting that in code I find a bit… I don’t know. Technically it would mean that anyone could look at the source code or the compiled IL code (or what it was called) and find that username and password and use it for spamming or other not so good activites. Which is not very good!
Any ideas? Is there a better and/or different approach to this problem? Doesn’t really have to be through email. But what I want is a way for the program to notify when something happens that I should fix. And to make that notification as little troublesome as possible to the user. Maybe even invisible (although a YesNo messagebox might be polite).
Anyone?
Instead of sending mail you could set up a web service that would receive the reports. The web service could run over https if you want to protect the data.
I did this for a customer once and it worked well.
The only problem is if the program is running somewhere without internet access.
Edit:
Don’t tell this to anyone, but we even took a screenshot of the program when it crashed and posted it together with all information about the error that we could gather. It was incredibly useful!