At a customer’s site, our application sometimes shows an “internal application error”.
I was able to get a dumpfile of such a situation; unfortunately, this file is not very helpful: It effectively only contains the information, in which event handler an exception occured. Since this event handler calls many other functions, I was not able to track down the root cause of the exception.
When I can reproduce such an error on my PC, I just have to catch first chance exceptions in the debugger and the problem is easily found.
I also don’t have problems finding the cause of hard crashes (e.g. access violation), because the resulting call stack points directly to the cause of the crash.
How can I find the cause of this error (installing small tools at the customer’s site is an option)?
1) Use Windebugger installed on the client machine.
2) Then get the Pdb files that belongs to the release at your customer end.
3) Open Windebugger, under file menu select the Symbol Path menu item, from the displayed window – Place the path to your symbol file.
4) Open your dump file
5) Issue the command at the bottom “!Analyze -v”
The debugger will give you the stack trace, current Instruction pointer location, last thrown (Unhandled?) exception or other bug cause