Question

I’m trying to write a program to test student code against a good implementation. I have a C++ console app that will run one test at a time determined by the command line args and a C# .net forms app that calls the c++ app once for each test. The goal is to be able to detect not just pass/fail for each test, but also “infinite” (>5secs) loop and exceptions (their code dying for whatever reason).

The problem is that not all errors kill the C++ app. If they corrupt the heap the system calls __debugbreak which pops up a window saying Debug Error! HEAP CORRUPTION DETECTED… My C# app is using Process.WaitForExit(5000) to wait, but this error doesn’t count as an exit, so I see a timeout.

So my question is, how can I either get the C# app to detect that this is an error OR how can I get the C++ app to die when this error occurs rather than giving a dialog box and asking if I want to debug?

Edit:
Here’s the error that pops up: Debug Error

Here’s the normal application failed dialog that pops up if I press retry in the previous dialog: Windows Error. The debug option goes away if you turn off the JIT debugger.

Answer 1

You should turn of JIT debugging, this page has instructions for how to turn it on or off.

Edit You can also use the _CrtSetReportMode and _CrtSetReportFile functions inside the C++ program to change the behaviour of the debug asserts (in particular, you can use _CRTDBG_MODE_FILE to write the contents of the message to a file instead of popping up a dialog.

If you’re compiling the program as part of your tests, then you can just add your own .cpp file which includes a global class that does the work in it’s constructor. Something like this:

// AssertModify.cpp
class AssertModify
{
public:
    AssertModify()
    {
        ::_CrtSetReportMode(...);
        ::_CrtSetReportFile(...);
    }
};

AssertModify am;

This’ll cause the code to run before main() is entered which should catch all possible cases (unless the student overrides your value themselves, but you can add a check for any calls to _CrtSetReportMode in their submitted code before you compile it)