We get a seemingly random AppCrash, where windows actually takes over the process and closes it, giving some arcane debugging report that includes things like NTDLL.dll, StackHash, User32.dll, etc. Researching these modules and information in the reports for more than a year yields little more information that we had before. The best we’ve been able to do is narrow it down to a DLL our application uses to interact with a piece of hardware that communicates over TCP/IP. We have no control over this external library, must use it, and given the fact the problem is random (cannot ever duplicate on our end, solves itself on a PC restart), we seem to be stuck with it.
The problem is that our application needs to run 24/7 on an instrument that is not monitored by a human being. I need to detect when our application crashes, and issue a restart command to the entire thing. The problem is detecting an AppCrash; no exceptions are generated inside the application (the AppCrash is external to the application), and no amount of logging generates any indication the program is closing.
What we’d like to do is run a service that checks for the application running or not, and if not it issues a reboot command to restart the system. However, when the AppCrash dialog is showing, it leaves the process running.
Is there a way to either prevent these AppCrash notifications, bypass them, or set them to at least close the program first? Please, no pointers to stackhash.com or using MS error reporting; these devices are not internet-capable. We also can’t fix whatever bug is in the DLL we’re using (OEM supplier is uncooperative).
One approach might be to have the app periodically tell another service that it’s alive and functioning well, rather than trying to detect when it crashes. Using IPC, you could send a heartbeat message to a monitoring service once a second.