Debug Assertion Failed: C++ exception in a C# application? - c#

I have been managing and updating a particular application. It is old and I am not the original developer. It's suffered through several debugging sessions over the years among other small patches.
It has been running stable for the last couple of months, but then an exception occurred that seems odd to me. Since this only happens on the server ( it is a server application. ) in release mode.
The application is written in C#, is managed in Visual Studio 2012 Professional and is released to be explicitly 32-bit .NET 3.5 since the server is unfortunately running Windows 2003. (I have tried to convince them to update so I can update the application to .NET 4.5. But alas.)
So I am getting a C++ Debug message. See the screenshot below. It occurs in a file named vsprintf.c I am guessing on line 91. The only message that gives me any hint is format != NULL.
This confuses me however. What can possibly cause this? What steps can I best take to debug in a situation like this? What is "vsprintf.c"?
Edit: I managed to find something in eventviewer. I will continue to research this in the meanwhile.
Sincerely,
me.

This is an assertion failure, ie an assumtion that a function you are calling makes is not met, in this case that a pointer is not null. From the looks of it, its a format string. Are you using format strings directly? If so, look there. If not, this is probably a memory leak problem, followed by an out-of-memory malfunction.

vsprintf calls can be caused by sprintf and other derivates, you should maybe check all these calls. (This can also be methods of string classes, as I saw in the VCL).
If the bug isn't caused by one of the libraries you use, then there should be a NULL (or 0) in the format string parameter, which is mostly the last before the ... in the prototype.
If you are familiar with regular expressions, this may help a lot when looking for patterns.

Related

Why in C# Console applications from template is crashes? [duplicate]

I'm hoping someone can enlighten me as to what could possibly be causing this error:
Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
I cannot really post code because this error seems to get thrown in any random area of the application. The application will run anywhere from 12-48 hours before throwing the error. Sometimes it will stop in a seemingly random spot and throw the above error, other times the entire application stops and I get a screen with an error that says something along the lines of "There was a fatal error in... This may be a bug in the CLR or..." something about PInvoke or other non relevant info. When this happens all threads show terminated and there is no debugging information available.
In a nutshell this is what the application does:
Its a multi-threaded server application written in entirely in C#. Clients connect to the server via socket. The server runs a virtual "environment" for the clients where they can interact with each other and the environment. It consumes quite a bit of memory but I do not see it leaking. It typically consumes about 1.5GB. I dont think its leaking because the memory usage stays relatively constant the entire time the application is running. Its constantly running code to maintain the environment even if the clients are not doing anything. It uses no 3rd party software or other APIs. The only outside resources this application uses is socket connections and SQL database connections. Its running on a 64bit server. I have tried debugging this in VS2008 & VS2010 using .net 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0 and on multiple servers and the problem still eventually occurs.
I've tried turning off compiler optimizations and several microsoft hot-fixes. Nothing seems to make this issue go away. It would be appreciated if anyone knows any possible causes, or some kind of way to identify whats causing the problem.
I have just faced this issue in VS 2013 .NET 4.5 with a MapInfo DLL. Turns out, the problem was that I changed the Platform for Build from x86 to Any CPU and that was enough to trigger this error. Changing it back to x86 did the trick. Might help someone.
I faced this issue with Visual Studio (VS) 2010. More interestingly, I had several types of projects in my solution namely a console application project, a WPF application project, a Windows Forms application project, etc. But it was failing only when, I was setting the Console Application type of project as start-up project of the solution. All the projects were completely empty. They had no user code or any 3rd party assemblies added as reference. All projects are referencing only the default assemblies of .NET base class library (BCL) which come with the project template itself.
How to solve the issue?
Go to project properties of the console application project (Alternately you can select the project file in solution explorer and press Alt + Enter key combination) > Go to Debug tab > Check the Enable unmanaged code debugging check box under Enable Debuggers section (refer screenshot) > Click Floppy button in the toolbar to save project properties.
Root cause of the issue is not known to me. Only thing I observed was that there were lot of windows updates which had got installed on my machine the previous night. All the updates constituted mostly of office updates and OS updates (More than a dozen KB articles).
Update: VS 2017 onward the setting name has changed to Enable native code debugging. It is available under Debugger engines section (refer screenshot):
The problem may be due to mixed build platforms DLLs in the project. i.e You build your project to Any CPU but have some DLLs in the project already built for x86 platform. These will cause random crashes because of different memory mapping of 32bit and 64bit architecture. If all the DLLs are built for one platform the problem can be solved.
Finally tracked this down with the help of WinDBG and SOS. Access violation was being thrown by some unknown DLL. Turns out a piece of software called "Nvidia Network Manager" was causing the problems. I'd read countless times how this issue can be caused by firewalls or antivirus, neither of which I am using so I dismissed this idea. Also, I was under the assumption that it was not environmental because it occurs on more than 1 server using different hardware. Turns out all the machines I tested this on were running "NVidia Network Manager". I believe it installs with the rest of the motherboard drivers.
Hopefully this helps someone as this issue was plaguing my application for a very long time.
Try to run this command
netsh winsock reset
Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20492181/1057791
This error should not happen in the managed code. This might solve the issue:
Go to Visual Studio Debugger to bypass this exception:
Tools menu -> Options -> Debugging -> General -> Uncheck this option "Suppress JIT optimization on module load"
Hope it will help.
I got this error when using pinvoke on a method that takes a reference to a StringBuilder. I had used the default constructor which apparently only allocates 16 bytes. Windows tried to put more than 16 bytes in the buffer and caused a buffer overrun.
Instead of
StringBuilder windowText = new StringBuilder(); // Probable overflow of default capacity (16)
Use a larger capacity:
StringBuilder windowText = new StringBuilder(3000);
I've ran into, and found a resolution to this exception today. It was occurring when I was trying to debug a unit test (NUnit) that called a virtual method on an abstract class.
The issue appears to be with the .NET 4.5.1 install.
I have downloaded .NET 4.5.2 and installed (my projects still reference .NET 4.5.1) and the issue is resolved.
Source of solution:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/819552/visual-studio-debugger-throws-accessviolationexception
It could be hardware. It could be something complicated...but I'd take a stab at suggesting that somewhere your threading code is not protecting some collection (such as a dictionary) with an appropriate lock.
What OS and service pack are you running?
I had this problem recently when I changed the development server for a project. I was getting this error on the line of code where I declared a new OracleConnection variable.
After trying many things, including installing hotfixes, I tried changing the references Oracle.DataAccess and System.Data.OracleClient in the project and it worked!
When a project is moved to a new machine, I suggest you renew all the references added in that project.
Did you try turning off DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for your application ?
Verifiable code should not be able to corrupt memory, so there's something unsafe going on. Are you using any unsafe code anywhere, such as in buffer processing? Also, the stuff about PInvoke may not be irrelevant, as PInvoke involves a transition to unmanaged code and associated marshaling.
My best recommendation is to attach to a crashed instance and use WinDBG and SOS to dig deeper into what's happening at the time of the crash. This is not for the faint of heart, but at this point you may need to break out more powerful tools to determine what, exactly, is going wrong.
I faced the same issue. My code was a .NET dll (AutoCAD extension) running inside AutoCAD 2012. I am also using Oracle.DataAccess and my code was throwing the same exception during ExecuteNonQuery(). I luckily solved this problem by changing the .net version of the ODP I was using (that is, 2.x of Oracle.DataAccess)
Ok, this could be pretty useless and simply anecdotal, but...
This exception was thrown consistently by some Twain32 libraries we were using in my project, but would only happen in my machine.
I tried lots of suggested solutions all over the internet, to no avail... Until I unplugged my cellphone (it was connected through the USB).
And it worked.
Turns out the Twain32 libraries were trying to list my phone as a Twain compatible device, and something it did in that process caused that exception.
Go figure...
in my case the file was open and therefore locked.
I was getting it when trying to load an Excel file using LinqToExcel that was also opened in Excel.
this is all I deeded
var maps = from f in book.Worksheet<NavMapping>()
select f;
try {
foreach (var m in maps)
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(m.SSS_ID) && _mappings.ContainsKey(m.SSS_ID))
_mappings.Add(m.SSS_ID, m.CDS_ID);
} catch (AccessViolationException ex) {
_logger.Error("mapping file error. most likely this file is locked or open. " + ex);
}
I got the same error in a project I was working with in VB.NET. Checking the "Enable application framework" on the properties page solved it for me.
I had the same error message:
System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
In my case, the error went away after clean and re-build the solution.
Make sure you are not creating multiple time converter objects.
you can use to singleton class to create a converter object to resolve the below error with Haukcode.WkHtmlToPdfDotNet library
System.AccessViolationException: 'Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.'
This issue is almost invariably a simple one. The code is bad. It's rarely the tools, just from a statistical analysis. Untold millions of people are using Visual Studio every day and maybe a few are using your code - which bit of code is getting the better testing? I guarantee that, if this were a problem with VS, we would probably already have found it.
What the statement means is that, when you try to access memory that isn't yours, it's usually because you're doing it with a corrupted pointer, that came from somewhere else. That's why it's stating the indication.
With memory corruption, the catching of the error is rarely near the root cause of the error. And the effects are exactly what you describe, seemingly random. You'll just have to look at the usual culprits, things like:
uninitialised pointers or other values.
writing more to a buffer than its size.
resources shared by threads that aren't protected by mutexes.
Working backwards from a problem like this to find the root cause is incredibly difficult given that so much could have happened between the creation of the problem and the detection of the problem.
I mostly find it's easier to have a look at what is corrupt (say, a specific pointer) and then do manual static analysis of the code to see what could have corrupted it, checking for the usual culprits as shown above. However, even this won't catch long chains of problems.
I'm not familiar enough with VS to know but you may also want to look into the possibility of using a memory tracking tool (like valgrind for Linux) to see if it can spot any obvious issues.
My answer very much depends on your scenario but we had an issue trying to upgrade a .NET application for a client which was > 10 years old so they could make it work on Windows 8.1. #alhazen's answer was kind of in the correct ballpark for me. The application was relying on a third-party DLL the client didn't want to pay to update (Pegasus/Accusoft ImagXpress). We re-targeted the application for .NET 4.5 but each time the following line executed we received the AccessViolationException was unhandled message:
UnlockPICImagXpress.PS_Unlock (1908228217,373714400,1341834561,28447);
To fix it, we had to add the following post-build event to the project:
call "$(DevEnvDir)..\tools\vsvars32.bat"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\amd64\editbin.exe" /NXCOMPAT:NO "$(TargetPath)"
This explicitly specifies the executable as incompatible with Data Execution Prevention. For more details see here.
i had this problem too .
i was running different solutions at the same time using visual studio , when closing other solutions and running just the target solution , it worked fine without that error .
Got this error randomly in VS1017, when trying to build a project that was building perfectly fine the day before. Restarting the PC fixed the issue worked (I also ran the following command beforehand, not sure if it's required: netsh winsock reset)
In my case I had to reference a C/C++ library using P/Invoke, but I had to ensure that the memory was allocated for the output array first using fixed:
[DllImport("my_c_func_lib.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Ansi)]
public static extern unsafe int my_c_func(double input1, double input2, double pinput3, double *outData);
public unsafe double[] GetMyUnmanagedCodeValue(double input1, double input2, double input3)
{
double[] outData = new double[24];
fixed (double* returnValue = outData)
{
my_c_func(input1, input2, pinput3, returnValue);
}
return outData;
}
For details please see: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/pointers-in-C-Sharp/
In some cases, this might happen when:
obj = new obj();
...
obj.Dispose(); // <----------------- Incorrect disposal causes it
obj.abc...
This happened to me when I was debugging my C# WinForms application in Visual Studio. My application makes calls to Win32 stuff via DllImport, e.g.
[DllImport("Secur32.dll", SetLastError = false)]
private static extern uint LsaEnumerateLogonSessions(out UInt64 LogonSessionCount, out IntPtr LogonSessionList);
Running Visual Studio "as Administrator" solved the problem for me.
In my case the FTDI utility FT Prog was throwing the error as it scanned for USB devices. Unplugging my Bluetooth headphones from the PC fixed the issue.
I got this error message on lambda expression that was using Linq to filter a collection of objects. When I inspected the collection I noticed that its members weren't populated - in the Locals window, expanding them just showed "...". Ultimately the problem was in the repository method that initially populated the collection - Dapper was trying to automatically map a property of a nested object. I fixed the Dapper query to handle the multi-mapping and that fixed the memory error.
This may not be the best answer for the above question, but the problem of mine was invalid dispose syntax and usage of lock(this) for a buffer object. It turned out the object was getting disposed from another thread because of "using" syntax. And the processing lock() was on a loose type.
// wrong lock syntax
lock(this) {
// modify buffer object
}
I changed the locks to
private static readonly object _lockObject = new object();
lock(_lockObject) {
// modify buffer object
}
And used suggested C# disposing syntax and the problem gone.
public void Dispose()
{
Dispose(true);
GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
}
protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
{
if (disposed)
return;
if (disposing)
{
// Free any managed objects here
buffer?.Free();
}
disposed = true;
}
I've experienced the same issue when running a .Net Framework Web API application locally under IIS.
The issue was that I had previously updated the IIS App Pool's Managed Pipeline Mode to 'Classic'. Setting it back to 'Integrated' fixed the issue for me.
For Xamarin Forms one can wrap the code in
Device.BeginInvokeOnMainThread(() =>
{
//your code
});
Happened for me in UWP when updating UI from the wrong thread.

How to debug an application which suddenly terminates without any feedback?

The application uses Xamarin.Android, which may be a big problem in itself. The problem is that sometimes it just quits (process is being terminated) and there's nothing in the log that can be associated with it. (although I guess that it's related to running out of memory, but I can't yet prove it — according to DDMS, most of the times all is OK, and if Xamarin.Android uses another pool of memory, then I don't know how to measure it)
I've searched the code base for "Environment.Exit" and, of course, didn't found anything.
What are the options for finding the culprit of such thing?
You could try to use the garbage collector by yourself. Just run
Runtime.getRuntime().gc();
The Runtime instance has also a method to read the free memory space. So you could figure out by yourself whether it's a memory problem.
EDIT:
Oh I read that Xamarin uses the C# language. But I'm quite sure that C# has similar methods.
When you say log, are you referring to an application log, or the device log?
When tracking down these sorts of bugs, I've always found aLogCat invaluable.
I open it, clear all the current logs, then use my application up to the point where it crashes. Then I quickly go back to aLogCat, pause it and scroll up to where the error is - it's usually found in the nearest red/orange blocks.
There's a blog post here about how I found attributes left out by the Xamarin linker using this method.

Find out where a multi-threading C# program is stuck

I have written a C# program having some thousand lines and several threads. Execution works fine for several hours/days until the application, which is running on a Windows server, starts to slow everything (other programs/web server) down as it suddenly begins to use up about 50-80% of the CPU.
I assume that it is stuck in some while-loop, but I do not know where exactly. It would already be a help to know which thread uses up the largest share of the system resources. As there is not any exception thrown, I do not see any direct possibility to find out.
The code has already been inspected but I did not find any significant/obvious programming mistakes.
Does anybody know a good way to let Visual Studio monitor the current CPU-load in order to show where it is used up?
Oh, how I love Managed Stack Explorer. http://mse.codeplex.com/ for most versions of .NET and https://github.com/vadimskipin/MSE for 4.0
Point it at your running application, and it snapshots the stacks of each thread. After looking at a few snapshots, you'll work out where the problem is. Oh, the nastiness of the problem I was facing when I first learnt of this. Oh the joy when it let me find what I'd been hunting for days in just a few minutes.
You can use Perfview (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28567) to capture and the analyse ETL traces when this happens.

How to find out cause of AppCrash?

On some machines my C# app crashes when started. How to find out what is the cause of the problem? Where to start my research?
When I get managed exceptions I have nice StackTrace and exception messages so I have good start point. But in AppCrash dialog there are some weird hex numbers, I don't know what they mean.
P.S. This machines do have appropriate .NET Framework installed.
Update: I'm not talking about specific exceptions, but rather about what are common methods of fixing those. I want to learn how to do it myself and not asking on forums about every error I encounter.
I would look in the event viewer before starting looking at memory dumps etc. Many times it can be Graphic Cards drivers etc who causes the crash and the event viewer will then show what have happen.
I would suggest taking a look at windbg to analyze the crash dump.
See this article for details:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463009.aspx
At a blind guess I'd say you don't have the correct version of the .NET framework on the machine that is failing. Eg, you are trying to run a .net4 application on a machine where .net2 only is installed.
How about posting a screenshot/text of the error?
Have you tried windbg with crashdump option ?.
so something like adplus –crash –sc c:\myfolder\Myapp.exe
You can find more details here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/anandbms/archive/2005/04/20/410225.aspx.

Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt

I'm hoping someone can enlighten me as to what could possibly be causing this error:
Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
I cannot really post code because this error seems to get thrown in any random area of the application. The application will run anywhere from 12-48 hours before throwing the error. Sometimes it will stop in a seemingly random spot and throw the above error, other times the entire application stops and I get a screen with an error that says something along the lines of "There was a fatal error in... This may be a bug in the CLR or..." something about PInvoke or other non relevant info. When this happens all threads show terminated and there is no debugging information available.
In a nutshell this is what the application does:
Its a multi-threaded server application written in entirely in C#. Clients connect to the server via socket. The server runs a virtual "environment" for the clients where they can interact with each other and the environment. It consumes quite a bit of memory but I do not see it leaking. It typically consumes about 1.5GB. I dont think its leaking because the memory usage stays relatively constant the entire time the application is running. Its constantly running code to maintain the environment even if the clients are not doing anything. It uses no 3rd party software or other APIs. The only outside resources this application uses is socket connections and SQL database connections. Its running on a 64bit server. I have tried debugging this in VS2008 & VS2010 using .net 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0 and on multiple servers and the problem still eventually occurs.
I've tried turning off compiler optimizations and several microsoft hot-fixes. Nothing seems to make this issue go away. It would be appreciated if anyone knows any possible causes, or some kind of way to identify whats causing the problem.
I have just faced this issue in VS 2013 .NET 4.5 with a MapInfo DLL. Turns out, the problem was that I changed the Platform for Build from x86 to Any CPU and that was enough to trigger this error. Changing it back to x86 did the trick. Might help someone.
I faced this issue with Visual Studio (VS) 2010. More interestingly, I had several types of projects in my solution namely a console application project, a WPF application project, a Windows Forms application project, etc. But it was failing only when, I was setting the Console Application type of project as start-up project of the solution. All the projects were completely empty. They had no user code or any 3rd party assemblies added as reference. All projects are referencing only the default assemblies of .NET base class library (BCL) which come with the project template itself.
How to solve the issue?
Go to project properties of the console application project (Alternately you can select the project file in solution explorer and press Alt + Enter key combination) > Go to Debug tab > Check the Enable unmanaged code debugging check box under Enable Debuggers section (refer screenshot) > Click Floppy button in the toolbar to save project properties.
Root cause of the issue is not known to me. Only thing I observed was that there were lot of windows updates which had got installed on my machine the previous night. All the updates constituted mostly of office updates and OS updates (More than a dozen KB articles).
Update: VS 2017 onward the setting name has changed to Enable native code debugging. It is available under Debugger engines section (refer screenshot):
The problem may be due to mixed build platforms DLLs in the project. i.e You build your project to Any CPU but have some DLLs in the project already built for x86 platform. These will cause random crashes because of different memory mapping of 32bit and 64bit architecture. If all the DLLs are built for one platform the problem can be solved.
Finally tracked this down with the help of WinDBG and SOS. Access violation was being thrown by some unknown DLL. Turns out a piece of software called "Nvidia Network Manager" was causing the problems. I'd read countless times how this issue can be caused by firewalls or antivirus, neither of which I am using so I dismissed this idea. Also, I was under the assumption that it was not environmental because it occurs on more than 1 server using different hardware. Turns out all the machines I tested this on were running "NVidia Network Manager". I believe it installs with the rest of the motherboard drivers.
Hopefully this helps someone as this issue was plaguing my application for a very long time.
Try to run this command
netsh winsock reset
Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20492181/1057791
This error should not happen in the managed code. This might solve the issue:
Go to Visual Studio Debugger to bypass this exception:
Tools menu -> Options -> Debugging -> General -> Uncheck this option "Suppress JIT optimization on module load"
Hope it will help.
I got this error when using pinvoke on a method that takes a reference to a StringBuilder. I had used the default constructor which apparently only allocates 16 bytes. Windows tried to put more than 16 bytes in the buffer and caused a buffer overrun.
Instead of
StringBuilder windowText = new StringBuilder(); // Probable overflow of default capacity (16)
Use a larger capacity:
StringBuilder windowText = new StringBuilder(3000);
I've ran into, and found a resolution to this exception today. It was occurring when I was trying to debug a unit test (NUnit) that called a virtual method on an abstract class.
The issue appears to be with the .NET 4.5.1 install.
I have downloaded .NET 4.5.2 and installed (my projects still reference .NET 4.5.1) and the issue is resolved.
Source of solution:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/819552/visual-studio-debugger-throws-accessviolationexception
It could be hardware. It could be something complicated...but I'd take a stab at suggesting that somewhere your threading code is not protecting some collection (such as a dictionary) with an appropriate lock.
What OS and service pack are you running?
I had this problem recently when I changed the development server for a project. I was getting this error on the line of code where I declared a new OracleConnection variable.
After trying many things, including installing hotfixes, I tried changing the references Oracle.DataAccess and System.Data.OracleClient in the project and it worked!
When a project is moved to a new machine, I suggest you renew all the references added in that project.
Did you try turning off DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for your application ?
Verifiable code should not be able to corrupt memory, so there's something unsafe going on. Are you using any unsafe code anywhere, such as in buffer processing? Also, the stuff about PInvoke may not be irrelevant, as PInvoke involves a transition to unmanaged code and associated marshaling.
My best recommendation is to attach to a crashed instance and use WinDBG and SOS to dig deeper into what's happening at the time of the crash. This is not for the faint of heart, but at this point you may need to break out more powerful tools to determine what, exactly, is going wrong.
I faced the same issue. My code was a .NET dll (AutoCAD extension) running inside AutoCAD 2012. I am also using Oracle.DataAccess and my code was throwing the same exception during ExecuteNonQuery(). I luckily solved this problem by changing the .net version of the ODP I was using (that is, 2.x of Oracle.DataAccess)
Ok, this could be pretty useless and simply anecdotal, but...
This exception was thrown consistently by some Twain32 libraries we were using in my project, but would only happen in my machine.
I tried lots of suggested solutions all over the internet, to no avail... Until I unplugged my cellphone (it was connected through the USB).
And it worked.
Turns out the Twain32 libraries were trying to list my phone as a Twain compatible device, and something it did in that process caused that exception.
Go figure...
in my case the file was open and therefore locked.
I was getting it when trying to load an Excel file using LinqToExcel that was also opened in Excel.
this is all I deeded
var maps = from f in book.Worksheet<NavMapping>()
select f;
try {
foreach (var m in maps)
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(m.SSS_ID) && _mappings.ContainsKey(m.SSS_ID))
_mappings.Add(m.SSS_ID, m.CDS_ID);
} catch (AccessViolationException ex) {
_logger.Error("mapping file error. most likely this file is locked or open. " + ex);
}
I got the same error in a project I was working with in VB.NET. Checking the "Enable application framework" on the properties page solved it for me.
I had the same error message:
System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
In my case, the error went away after clean and re-build the solution.
Make sure you are not creating multiple time converter objects.
you can use to singleton class to create a converter object to resolve the below error with Haukcode.WkHtmlToPdfDotNet library
System.AccessViolationException: 'Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.'
This issue is almost invariably a simple one. The code is bad. It's rarely the tools, just from a statistical analysis. Untold millions of people are using Visual Studio every day and maybe a few are using your code - which bit of code is getting the better testing? I guarantee that, if this were a problem with VS, we would probably already have found it.
What the statement means is that, when you try to access memory that isn't yours, it's usually because you're doing it with a corrupted pointer, that came from somewhere else. That's why it's stating the indication.
With memory corruption, the catching of the error is rarely near the root cause of the error. And the effects are exactly what you describe, seemingly random. You'll just have to look at the usual culprits, things like:
uninitialised pointers or other values.
writing more to a buffer than its size.
resources shared by threads that aren't protected by mutexes.
Working backwards from a problem like this to find the root cause is incredibly difficult given that so much could have happened between the creation of the problem and the detection of the problem.
I mostly find it's easier to have a look at what is corrupt (say, a specific pointer) and then do manual static analysis of the code to see what could have corrupted it, checking for the usual culprits as shown above. However, even this won't catch long chains of problems.
I'm not familiar enough with VS to know but you may also want to look into the possibility of using a memory tracking tool (like valgrind for Linux) to see if it can spot any obvious issues.
My answer very much depends on your scenario but we had an issue trying to upgrade a .NET application for a client which was > 10 years old so they could make it work on Windows 8.1. #alhazen's answer was kind of in the correct ballpark for me. The application was relying on a third-party DLL the client didn't want to pay to update (Pegasus/Accusoft ImagXpress). We re-targeted the application for .NET 4.5 but each time the following line executed we received the AccessViolationException was unhandled message:
UnlockPICImagXpress.PS_Unlock (1908228217,373714400,1341834561,28447);
To fix it, we had to add the following post-build event to the project:
call "$(DevEnvDir)..\tools\vsvars32.bat"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\amd64\editbin.exe" /NXCOMPAT:NO "$(TargetPath)"
This explicitly specifies the executable as incompatible with Data Execution Prevention. For more details see here.
i had this problem too .
i was running different solutions at the same time using visual studio , when closing other solutions and running just the target solution , it worked fine without that error .
Got this error randomly in VS1017, when trying to build a project that was building perfectly fine the day before. Restarting the PC fixed the issue worked (I also ran the following command beforehand, not sure if it's required: netsh winsock reset)
In my case I had to reference a C/C++ library using P/Invoke, but I had to ensure that the memory was allocated for the output array first using fixed:
[DllImport("my_c_func_lib.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Ansi)]
public static extern unsafe int my_c_func(double input1, double input2, double pinput3, double *outData);
public unsafe double[] GetMyUnmanagedCodeValue(double input1, double input2, double input3)
{
double[] outData = new double[24];
fixed (double* returnValue = outData)
{
my_c_func(input1, input2, pinput3, returnValue);
}
return outData;
}
For details please see: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/pointers-in-C-Sharp/
In some cases, this might happen when:
obj = new obj();
...
obj.Dispose(); // <----------------- Incorrect disposal causes it
obj.abc...
This happened to me when I was debugging my C# WinForms application in Visual Studio. My application makes calls to Win32 stuff via DllImport, e.g.
[DllImport("Secur32.dll", SetLastError = false)]
private static extern uint LsaEnumerateLogonSessions(out UInt64 LogonSessionCount, out IntPtr LogonSessionList);
Running Visual Studio "as Administrator" solved the problem for me.
In my case the FTDI utility FT Prog was throwing the error as it scanned for USB devices. Unplugging my Bluetooth headphones from the PC fixed the issue.
I got this error message on lambda expression that was using Linq to filter a collection of objects. When I inspected the collection I noticed that its members weren't populated - in the Locals window, expanding them just showed "...". Ultimately the problem was in the repository method that initially populated the collection - Dapper was trying to automatically map a property of a nested object. I fixed the Dapper query to handle the multi-mapping and that fixed the memory error.
This may not be the best answer for the above question, but the problem of mine was invalid dispose syntax and usage of lock(this) for a buffer object. It turned out the object was getting disposed from another thread because of "using" syntax. And the processing lock() was on a loose type.
// wrong lock syntax
lock(this) {
// modify buffer object
}
I changed the locks to
private static readonly object _lockObject = new object();
lock(_lockObject) {
// modify buffer object
}
And used suggested C# disposing syntax and the problem gone.
public void Dispose()
{
Dispose(true);
GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
}
protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
{
if (disposed)
return;
if (disposing)
{
// Free any managed objects here
buffer?.Free();
}
disposed = true;
}
I've experienced the same issue when running a .Net Framework Web API application locally under IIS.
The issue was that I had previously updated the IIS App Pool's Managed Pipeline Mode to 'Classic'. Setting it back to 'Integrated' fixed the issue for me.
For Xamarin Forms one can wrap the code in
Device.BeginInvokeOnMainThread(() =>
{
//your code
});
Happened for me in UWP when updating UI from the wrong thread.

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