Read before posting... [WebWare SDK]

RussD

I understand that people who are posting questions in these forums are often faced with problems that they can't resolve and are under great pressure to resolve them.

Unfortunately, by just typing up some vague description of your problem and not giving even basic configuration information about your setup, you are really wasting your time because the tendency for most people is to ignore such posts.

After all, participation in this forum is voluntary, and when I or any other members respond, we are doing so at the expense of all the projects that we have to deliver. So with these thoughts in mind, here are a few guidelines that will help you to get answers more quickly (or at all):

1. Identify the product in question.

WebWare is the brand name for a family of products, it is not the name of what you installed. You installed WebWare SDK or WebWare Server, or possibly Interlink or the S4 OPC Server.

2. Identify the exact version of what you installed.

The version will look something like 3.02.0317 or 4.50.0015. There is a world of difference between WebWare SDK 1.3 and 4.5, and the response to a question may differ greatly by version. Look under the Help Menu, or in Add/Remove Products, or right-click a file in Windows Explorer to view its properties.

3. Identify the major and minor version of RobotWare that is installed on the robot controller in question.

This will be something like 4.0.115 or 3.2.53. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to identify this from the robot controller, but anyone who is trying to develop PC-Robot software applications should be familiar enough with the controller to know this information.

4. Identify the OS and Service pack version of the PC with which you are experiencing the problem.

This is always important information, but much more so with the emergence of Windows XP Service Pack 2.

5. Provide as detailed of an explanation as possible.

This is just common sense. Posting a topic saying no more than "Interlink crashed, why?" is a waste of everyone's time. Some people should consider writing a rough draft of their posting offline, then revisiting it later to discover all of the things that don't make sense or are unclear before posting.

6. Don't post hundreds of lines of code and ask others to debug it.

At least take the time to identify the particular line of code that is causing problems. This and other forums should be the last resort for solving problems, not the first place that you turn when something doesn't work as you thought it should.