IES Technical Support Guidelines
Before Requesting Technical Assistance
- Do you have the latest updates installed?
- Please Search the User's Guide (Help menu)
- Please Search the FAQ Answers
- Make sure your question is not 'engineering consultation'
Tips for Communicating with IES
- Put a clear subject line in your email message
(We get hundreds of spam emails every day, don't let yours get lost!) - Tell us which product & version you are using!
- Try to use the software's terminology, if possible
- Be specific with questions, these do not help:
"The software crashed, why?"
"I have a problem, it doesn't work, can you help me?"
Instead, use statements like this:
"After selecting a member in the Model View, I applied a Moving Load, and the application shut down (disappeared) without error." - Include a project file to demonstrate the issue or help us see some behavior. (Save VisualAnalysis files without results, using File | Save As...)
Needle in a Haystack?
Fixing Crashes
FAQ: Why Does It Crash?
We regularly get "crash reports" from customers with a message like this.
"The software has crashed, do you know why? Can you fix it NOW?!"
While we would love to be able to push the "Easy Button" and fix everything, the situation is a little more uncertain.
Living with Windows
Application crashes in Windows are all too frequent in any application that we run. We are regularly getting crashes in just about every program including MS Word, Excel, Outlook, VisualStudio (the MS C++ compiler), QuickBooks, Act! and even Windows itself. The major cause of the problem is that the systems are simply too complex: layers upon layers of code from a variety of manufacturers built on layers of hardware components from hundreds of vendors.
Hardware Abstraction
Your video card driver could very well be the source of crashes, especially if you make frequent use of the Picture View in VisualAnalysis. Your printer card driver could be causing problems as well, and so we recommend that you try updating these device drivers to see if that helps with your system's stability.
Background Processes
On top of the system complexity you have the added complications of interacting "services" such as Norton Antivirus, and the two dozen other sub-systems that may be running in the background and "hooked" into various Windows operations each interpreting, blocking, changing, re-ordering messages, etc. In other words, drastically altering the behavior of the basic Windows system.
Isolating The Problem
The bottom line is that locating the source of the crashing is like finding the "needle in the haystack", unless we have some additional clues or debugging aides.
For example, we have been collecting crash reports in VisualAnalysis 5.5 for 16 months and this has enabled us to locate and fix dozens of crashing problems and potential crashing problems, but in the last six to nine months, we have learned very little from these reports, as the remaining crashes are from various low-level systems that we are not able to trace with the current details in our reports. We hope to improve the diagnostic capabilities in VisualAnalysis 6.0, where we will be eliminating support for Windows 98 and Windows NT systems, which hamper our abilities.
Explaining Your Situation
If you experience crashes or system "hangs", then the most important information IES Support can get from you is any recognition of a pattern in the crashing (i.e., "It always happens after I do X", or "It only crashes if I run the software all day").
Any clues from you that will help us narrow down the search for offending code from 200,000 lines of code to 100 lines or even narrowing our search down to a large module like "LRFD steel design", can help.
The holy-grail for IES Support is a small example project file, along with step-by-step instructions for reproducing a problem. We can run this through our debugging tools and locate the offending line of code.
Protection & Backing Up
Your first defense is to use our latest products and the latest updates available. We still regularly get crash reports from customers using a release that is over 12 months old. (Updates are free and usually take less than 5 or 10 minutes to download.)
The best approach for you to take is to make use of and understand our crash-protection system and "history file" mechanisms in VisualAnalysis and to make sure they are turned on. Make regular "checkpoint" saves of your work to avoid loss. You can pay attention to changes made in other systems (hardware or software) on your machine so that you can recognize when some change has negative consequences on other software packages. You can try disabling certain "add-ins" to Windows in a trial-and-error fashion to see if they are contributing to the instability problems, etc. You can try running VisualAnalysis on a different machine to see if you experience the same behavior in a different environment.
IES Customer Partnership
IES engineers and customers have the same goals in mind: zero crashes, 100% stability, an engineer's dream system! Every single failure in VisualAnalysis (or any IES product) puts IES at risk and we do not treat that lightly. Together we can create systems that offer excellent feature sets, incredible performance and a stable and robust platform for structural engineering.