"Program has encountered an error" vs "Unhandled exception"

Question

I have created a program that I have released online. I have tried to handle all the exception, but sometimes the program still has crashes. But when I reproduce the crash on my side, it says: "Unhandled exception has occurred in your application". The users of my program see "The program has encountered a problem" and a little bar comes up with text above it "Looking for solution".

Do I see a different window to the users because I have the full development environment installed and they just have the runtime? And is there a way to save the DEV state of the program when it crashes or bring up a message saying: "The program has crashed, would you like to send details to the developer" or something like that?

can you confirm what technology you are using? by application is it WPF? Have you looked at other questions, for instance http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5762526/how-can-i-make-something-that-catches-all-unhandled-exceptions-in-a-winforms-a — Mike Miller, Sep 03 '14 at 17:45
It sounds like they might not have the required .net runtime installed on their machine — Sam I am says Reinstate Monica, Sep 03 '14 at 17:46
It's written in C# with Visual Studio Express 2013 for Desktop — tertrih, Sep 03 '14 at 17:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 03 '14 at 17:53

2

I would suggest adding event handlers to Application.ThreadException and AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException to implement general error handling there.

answered Sep 03 '14 at 17:53

Zer0

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '14 at 17:55

Sounds like you're developing for windows. The crash your users are seeing is different presumably because when you're running it you have a debugger attached.

What you could do is download the "Microsoft Ecosystem Metadata Exchange" (MEME) program from https://sysdev.microsoft.com/, by logging in with your MSDN account, you should be able to find the download.

The "Looking for solution" dialog is sending minidumps to sysdev.

register your binaries with the MEME tool
check out sysdev site for your minidumps
open minidump with visual studio and select your binary
you're in debug mode broken at the exception.
inspect call stack
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"Program has encountered an error" vs "Unhandled exception"

2 Answers2