How to ask questions in a forum to increase your chances of an answer

Being developers I guess we all get the same feeling when some user of our application tell us that the app “doesn’t work”, or “it gives me an error” without further details. I am always tempted to reply “it works for me” to the first case and “which are the ‘first name’ and ‘last name’ of the error?” for the second case, to see if they get that more information is needed to do something about it. Yet after years in the forums I keep seeing lame posts written by developers that fail to give a meaningful subject, the version of the product that are using, the error that are experiencing, the code to reproduce it (or they provide the whole file of code with tons of lines), etc. I wonder how they expect to get a prompt and useful answer…

So today I decided to do something about it and I have written a sticky post in the MSDN forum about Visual Studio Extensibility:

How to ask questions to increase your chances of an answer
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsx/thread/9307ca0b-d152-4c31-85f5-05b6166d7410