Cannot accurately vote or validate bugs without access to attachment

Posted by Microsoft on 10/31/2006 at 12:19 PM

Thanks Peter for the suggestion. We've historically not allowed customers to view/download file attachments due to privacy and other concerns, however we'll think about this again for our future versions and whether there might be a way for us to support viewing of some types of file attachments.

Regards, Mike (Connect Product Team)

Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 12/10/2006 at 8:28 AM

I SHOULD AT LEAST BE ABLE TO VIEW MY OWN ATTACHMENTS!

Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 12/10/2006 at 8:41 AM

I SHOULD AT LEAST BE ABLE TO VIEW MY OWN ATTACHMENTS!

Posted by CommonGenius.com on 2/21/2008 at 12:26 PM

Here's a great example where this is necessary: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=329486.

If the user knows that anything he posts on the description is publicly visible, then why is it such a big deal for attachments to be publicly visible as well? If he needs private attachments, there are other ways to accomplish that.

Posted by AaronBertrand on 2/22/2008 at 7:20 AM

Why not just have a checkbox next to the attachment that says private, and is checked by default? Then at least the user is making a conscious decision to make his attachment public.

And I agree with Erland... I should be able to view my own attachments once I've submitted them. What I do instead, particularly for screen shots, is post the image to my web site also, and then refer to both the attachment and the URL in the item. But that's more work than unchecking a checkbox.

Posted by Peter Ritchie on 3/19/2008 at 10:54 AM

This issue is not "fixed"

Posted by Albert2 on 1/4/2009 at 5:52 PM

I agree. This is downright silly.

Posted by CommonGenius.com on 10/6/2009 at 11:35 AM

I was under the impression that this was going to be fixed in the new release, but it has not been. Validating bugs, or often even understanding what they are talking about, is impossible without being able to see attachments. When is this going to be addressed?

Posted by Roberto Bojorquez [Msft] on 10/29/2009 at 5:57 PM

We are working on it. We have faced some legal and technical issues on the way, but we definitely have this on our radar. Will update you guys as soon as we have some more info on this.

Thanks

Posted by Daniel Smith on 10/29/2009 at 6:55 PM

If the next release contains nothing but support for viewing attachments, I'd be happy.

This week there have been loads of bugs submitted on the Visual Studio connection with the recent release of beta 2, and there have been quite a few reports of visual defects with attached images. It's super frustrating that these cannot be viewed. Some posters have actually gone the extra mile, knowing the limitations of Connect, and posted their images to third party sites. We really shouldn't have to do that though.

As for the legal issues, surely these could be easily overcome/bypassed by simply providing an interface where the submitter has to specifically mark attachments as public, and possibly also limit the attachments to specific file types e.g. images/videos.