I work on an open source product called EVEMon written in C# targeting the .NET 2.0 platform, I have one user who is suffering from a strange .NET crash that we have been unable to resolve.
Event Type: Error Event Source: .NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting Event Category: None Event ID: 5000 Date: 4/29/2009 Time: 10:58:10 PM User: N/A Computer: removed this Description: EventType clr20r3, P1 evemon.exe, P2 1.2.7.1301, P3 49ea37c8, P4 system.windows.forms, P5 2.0.0.0, P6 4889dee7, P7 6cd3, P8 18, P9 system.argumentexception, P10 NIL. Data: //hex representation of the above Description
The application itself crashes with out displaying an error (despite having a error handling UI), the above messages was copied out of the Windows Event log. The end user has re-installed .NET and updated to the latest versions. The .PDB files are distributed with every release version of the program to aid in debugging and testing, the user with the problem in question has the full complement of PDB files for the correct version of EVEMon.
Is there a specific, tried and tested technique to analyse and diagnose this type of crash? and if so what tools and technologies are available to aid in debugging?
Special Thanks
I would like to give special thanks to Steffen Opel and highlight that his answer whilst not directly answering the question I was asking, addressed the bigger issue with my code base that the global error handling was missing an important component.
This is how I would tackle the problem for a end user with a crash.
Download and install Debugging Tools for Windows at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
Once the tools are installed (they end up going to C:\Program Files\ by default) start a command line window.
Change to the directory which contains adplus (e.g “C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)”).
Run the follwing command. This will start the application and attach adplus.
After the crash dump is created
Once the application crashes start WinDbg and load the .dmp file that is created in C:\debug. (File –> Open Crash Dump)
Execute these commands to see the stack trace and hopefully find the problem.
To load SOS for debugging
To see the stack trace
To see a more useful stack trace
To poke inside an object..perhaps see what caused the exception
e.g This is the result from a application that faulted randomly with an IO exception. WinDbg pointed out the path that was being referenced which was incorrect.