Question

So the other day my C# application crashed. Usually, with a .NET application, if you have an unhandled exception you get a nice error message with a stack trace.

However, this time, I got a different dialog that just told me there was an error and offered to attach a Debugger, but there was no stack trace in the dialog and the machine it was running on had no debugger installed.

What gives? Why don’t I see the default .NET exception handler?

Answer 1

Many, many things can cause this to happen:

• Crashes in unmanaged code (i.e. access violations, bad GDI calls, closed handles, etc.);
• Unhandled exceptions on background threads;
• Unhandled exceptions in certain message handlers (i.e. OnPaint);
• Fatal exceptions such as OutOfMemoryException, StackOverflowException, BadImageFormatException, and so on – which could prevent the global exception handler from ever running;
• Unhandled exceptions occurring during app initialization or shutdown;
• Hardware failures – bad memory/disk sectors, etc.
• …and many more.

Really the only way to be sure is to determine steps that will reproduce the error and use a tool like WinDbg to actually debug the part that’s crashing.