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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T22:30:44+00:00

I support a .NET 2.0 Winforms application that is fairly widely deployed. On rare

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I support a .NET 2.0 Winforms application that is fairly widely deployed. On rare occasion we get a support call from a customer in which the application returns a .NET runtime exception AS SOON as you attempt to launch the application.

In the past we have helped the customer re-install the .net framework and very often that works…but occasionally not.

In such a situation could the Windows Debugging Tools be used to determine the cause of the problem. If so would you HAVE to download debugging symbols to the target computer (want to avoid since that can be several hundred MBs of stuff to download to the target.)

Is this overkill for a .net app? Any alternatives. How would you go about debugging this. Non-specific step-by-step would be appreciated. Of course, this app is compiled as a RELEASE configuration on the target machine. The customer will very likely NOT have dev tools installed or debugging tools. We DO usually have remote control access to the computer. To re-iterate. This happens AS SOON AS the customer attempts to run the application and it fails immediately.

What is the quickest path to solving this problem for the customer?

Here is an example of a recent error from the Event Log.
EventType clr20r3. .exe P2 2010.1.0.0, p3 4B857AFD P4 BLAH BLAH
system.invalidoperation, P10 NIL.

Source: .NET Runtime 2.0 Error.
EventID: 5000

Thanks in advance.

Seth

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why not use that?

    For customers’ machine, you won’t be able to do remote debugging. Therefore, it is recommended to capture crash dump for crashing and hang dumps for hang problems, and WinDbg or ADPlus.exe is very useful here.

    Ask your end user to launch your application in WinDbg, and execute 

    .dump /f path

    to save a crash dump, then you can ask for the dump file and analyze the crash.

    On target machine, no symbol is required. Symbols are useful when you analyze the crash dump on your own machine, and that’s where things such as SOS are useful.

    Of course there are other ways to get crash dumps,

    http://blogs.msdn.com/lexli/archive/2009/08/23/when-the-application-program-crashes-on-windows.aspx

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