24 Apr '081 min read

BuildBot on Windows

BuildBot is nice… I use it for the XMMS2 project, and I use it at work. However, the hellspawn OS known as Windows likes to tell the user if some executable crashes. This might be nice and user-friendly as it’s a pretty common scenario that applications crash on this OS, but when running unittests in a buildbot slave this causes the slave to hang instead as there’s nobody watching the screen and clicking the ok button in the dialog box. Killing the application with the Win32-api doesn’t help as the message box is heavily guarded by the OS (…or rather the result of another application intercepting the crash). I bet others have stumbled upon this disturbing issue, and like me don’t know that much about the OS in question, so here’s one solution that works:

  1. Disable problem reporting under “Properties” in “My Computer”.
  2. Disable JIT debugging in Tools->Options->Debug in Visual Studio.
  3. Enable Dr Watson by running drwtsn32.exe -i.