Question

I’ve got a WPF app that runs perfectly fine inside VS.NET, but if I try to run it outside of VS.NET, I get a “… has encountered a problem and needs to close..” dialog. This happens in Debug and Release modes. Why is this happening?

Answer 1

Most likely this is an uncaught exception. You might want to try using the Application.DispatcherUnhandledException Event to display a message box with the exception to narrow down the problem:

Add this to your App.xaml as an attribute to the <Application> tag:

DispatcherUnhandledException="Application_DispatcherUnhandledException"

while the implementation of that handler might look like the following:

private void Application_DispatcherUnhandledException(object sender, System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
{
    System.Windows.MessageBox.Show(e.Exception.ToString());
}

But without much context this could be anything that is causing it and you probably have a better understanding where it comes from when looking at the exception.