How to get a crash dump in Windows Form application

Question

NOTE: This is not a duplicate of Is there a setting that is preventing the unhandled exception dialog from displaying in apps that I compile? because that post is asking the opposite question (how to get the dialog I want to eliminate) and the answers provided, although they provide some pertinent information to my question, it does not answer the question which is how do I get my application to create a crash dump when an unhandled exception is thrown from a Windows Form Event.

Why on earth would anyone want there users to see this dialog is beyond me.

But that's besides the point of this post. How do I get my application to produce a crash dump instead? I can't figure it out.

EDIT: Let's say for example, my executable is myapplication.exe. When it crashes I want WERFAULT.EXE to handle it so it will create a crash dump that my customers can send me so I can investigate the problem. If I throw an unhandled exception from one of my threads I get a crash dump. But when I throw an unhandled exception from within a Windows Form event the dialog above is shown.

I created a myapplication.exe.config file and entered the following as directed at the bottom of the details of this dialog.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <system.windows.forms jitDebugging="true" />
</configuration>

And I put the myapplication.exe.config file in my installation directory besides my application.exe file.

Now the application just goes away. No crash dump, even though I have my registry configured to create crash dumps. As directed here.

In my installer I create the necessary registry changes to force my application to create crash dumps. In

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\myapplication.exe

registry key I set DumpType to 2, DumpFolder to our application data directory and DumpCount to 1. But process just goes away and no crash dump is created.

I know the machine is configured to create crash dumps correctly because I can add code to other applications to make them crash and crash dumps get created correctly.

EDIT: If I added to my main entry point Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode to UnhandledExceptionMode.ThrowException I don't get the dialog, but the process just goes away. No crash dump.

Answer 1

Answered my own question. As far as I can tell there is no configuration that will enable Windows Forms application to create a crash dump when an unhandled exception is thrown from a Windows form event. But you can trigger it in code.

.NET catches exceptions thrown in it's form events and displays the .NET error dialog shown above. This can be controlled by Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode and Application.ThreadException event handler.

The premise of my solution is to handle the thread exception event and rethrow the exception outside of a windows form event. If the exception is not caught it will create a crash dump if the machine is configured to do so.

The only drawback from this is that the stack trace will not be the stack trace of when the initial exception occurred and you can't get it from the exception object that is thrown in a crash dump. So you will want to log the stack trace somewhere.

    private class ApplicationThreadException : Exception
    {
        public new Exception InnerException { get; internal set; }
        public ApplicationThreadException(Exception e)
        {
            InnerException = e;
        }
    }

    static void Application_ThreadException(object sender, ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)
    {
        throw new ApplicationThreadException(e.Exception);
    }

    [STAThread]
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Application.ThreadException += new ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException);
        try
        {
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Application.Run(new MyForm());
        }
        catch (ApplicationThreadException e)
        {
            throw e.InnerException;
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            // do what ever
        }
    }