Question

My winform application crashes as soon as its been launched. This problem is only happening in one of the client computer. Works fine for all other clients. I was thinking of using ADPlus to get a crash dump but problem is in order to configure ADPlus in crash mode, debugger need to be attached to running application first. That means application must be running when I configure ADPlus, however, as I said my application crashes as soon as I start it. It does not give me a chance to run ADPlus. Any idea if ADPlus can be used in this scenario? Are there any other tools that I can use generate a process dump in this case?

Answer 1

Since you can’t start the program and then attach a debugger in time, you can try one of the following ideas:

• Start the program under the debugger on the machine where it’s crashing. As already mentioned, ProcDump is enough for that purpose, or you can use Visual Studio or WinDBG.
• If you can’t easily start the program under the debugger (for example, if it is actually a Windows service), use gflags to make Windows start the program under the debugger. This will create a subkey for your program filename under the Image File Execution Options registry key.
• Set your debugger as the postmortem debugger, so it always launches when any program crashes.

If and when the crash happens, the debugger will automatically break in and either create a dump automatically or let you create one manually.

If you can’t run a debugger, not even ProcDump, you can use Windows’ built-in crash dump facility to create a dump automatically:

• On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, set Dr. Watson as the postmortem debugger by running this command:

  drwtsn32 -i
  

  Here is info on what this command does and how to use Dr. Watson: Capturing Application Crash Dumps

• On Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008, and later, set Windows Error Reporting to save dumps locally by creating this registry key:

  HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps
  

  You don’t need to create or set any values or subkeys under this key. If you want to change settings, here is more info: Collecting User-Mode Dumps

  Note that “applications that do their own custom crash reporting, including .NET applications, are not supported by” WER. This is a problem for you because your app uses WinForms – although there is some indication that the feature does work with .NET 4 apps on Windows 7.