I'm finishing up a C# app for work, and looking to make a ClickOnce installer.
Right now, I just want to make sure the installer works and that I am able to run the exe without Visual Studio.
So I set up my project to require Windows Installer and .NET 3.5 SP1, and tell it to download from a vendor (I'll be including the components later, but not for this test). It's just a basic utility that won't need updates, so I disable updates and tell it to use a CD/DVD install method since I just want to run it locally. When I run the resultant setup.exe, I get the installation prompt, and MyApp appears in Add/Remove Programs. But, as soon as the installer finishes it crashes with this message:
[MyApp] has encountered a problem and
needs to close. We are sorry for the
inconvenience.
The same message pops up when you try to run the .exe. No Start Menu folders are created during installation. I tried doing away with creating the setup file altogether so it just generated the .application file, but I still got the same error.
Am I missing something obvious? My app compiles in Release configuration and runs just fine. Is ClickOnce just not supposed to work with regular WinForms applications?
This question:
WPF application crash after ClickOnce publish
Sounds similar to my issue, but I'm using Windows Forms, and thus not getting an XAML exception. It just refuses to run.
A good place to start is to add a handler for the AppDomain.UnhandledException event. This is the event which is raised when an exception occurs inside your code and is not handled by a try/catch block (or is re-thrown and never handled again). .NET's behavior in this condition is to close the application--from it's perspective there is a runaway error.
In this event handler, you should--at a minimum--log the error in a manner that ensures it will be written before the application closes. This could be a very rudementary MessageBox to show the error contents, writing to a text-file, or (preferably) writting to a common logging location.
Related
Here is my problem:
I've created a little app to communicate with a server, nothing much particular. I'd like to publish it so I can give the app to my friends but after being published, I click the setup, it asks me to install, and after a few seconds, closes and nothing happens.
I've tried to "publish" the app with a Setup project, it installs and when I try to open the app, nothing happens.
I looked for solutions but nothing worked for me. Do you have any ideas?
The programm is under Visual Studio 2019, .NET 4.7.2
This could be related to different reasons, like lack of runtime ( .NET framework runtime ) on target machines or application behavior as well ( you did not tell much about it).
You could use some logging framework like NLogger or Log4Net to save in a log file at least critical errors and warnings so that you could see on target machine directly what the issues are.
in general if you properly used a setup project that should make sure your installer checks for dependencies like .NET runtime and also creates a desktop shortcut,
if you are publishing via ClickOnce you can easily specify in there to create a desktop icon and to include or download pre-requisites during installation phase.
Are you sure the issue is not related to exception handling and some failure happens when application started and tried to communicate with your server and for whatever network setting or reason fails to do so and then silently crashes?
If you try to connect to the server at the initialization of your program (form_load, etc.), it can happen when the connecting to the server fails. The whole application waits to reach a timeout, which may be 30 seconds long. Please check this scenario. See if the server is available and connectable.
I've completed a C# program which uses winforms and Microsoft.Speech (both recognition and synthesis) library, built it and it runs fine on the same computer. However when I copy the whole application directory to another computer the program starts and shuts down immediately.
Things I have tried:
Main method has a try-catch which prints all exceptions. I've tried
running the both straight from the directory and command line, both
resulting identically the program closing immediately without any
exceptions thrown
I've checked that the computer I'm trying to run the executable on has the correct version of .NET framework (my executable uses 4.5.2
and the computer states it already has a newer version)
I've also downloaded the Microsoft.Speech libraries on the new computer, no effect
Obviously I have gone wrong about the whole deployment task here. Most of the beginner guides suggest using the Setup and Deployment project template, but that is no longer supported in Visual Studio. As this is a whole new area of programming to me I'm now completely lost on how to proceed. Please help.
add a try{}(Exception ex)catch{} statement and within the catch statement you write the ex.toString() to a file, so you can read the error.
I develop C# applications using VS 2010 Ultimate.
Usually, those applications run for long time, without user interaction and, of course, they usually have bugs inside.
Unfortunately, often the application crashes randomly and you just can't reproduce the error. Also sometimes I only have the message "The application has stopped working" with no more informations.
I can install Visual Studio on the machine of the customer, but I can't let him run VS and compile/start the source code in debug mode! What I need is to start VS after the application was started and crashed. It seems to be possible to do this, in fact when an exception happens at runtime, Windows ask you "do you want to debug with VS?", but if I answer YES, then VS starts but simply I can't see the source code (it is on the pc as well), thus I can't inspect the row of code that is causing the exception. VS just tells me "source code not available". Actually, I can't imagine how Windows could start VS and know where the source code of the crashed application is!
Does anyone knows how does this debugging scenario is intended to work, and how to configure it??
Thanks a lot,
Simone
Windbg debugging tool solves the purpose.
Take dump of the process state and start analyzing with windbg. It gives you the exception information
To debug from an already-running Visual Studio instance, select the "Debug" menu item, then "Attach to Process..."
Next, select the executable from the list, press "Attach" (or double-click), and you are now debugging the application. When you select "Yes" and Windows says that source code is not available, this most likely means that the PDB wasn't able to be loaded, so make sure that you have loaded the symbols for the module by examining it in the "Modules" window pane.
If you want to catch errors while running compiled program, you should use some sort of logging mechanism. These days you don't have to write it on your own, there's a great opensource logging engine designed for .NET applications, it's called NLog. It's capable of saving logs into files, emails, console or database, pretty much all you can want :).
Hope this helps :)
I have a program that I built that reads and writes files. I built it in Release mode, then tried to run the exe on Win7. At first, with troubleshooting on, Windows simply told me the application closed and it was looking for a solution. After a few seconds, the dialog would disappear and show nothing more.
So with some significant effort I got the debugger attached to the process, but it was only showing me disassembly, which tells me that the error taking place wasn't in my application code, but in the framework somewhere.
The strange thing is that when I let the debugger attach, then press "stop" in VS, and exit the debugger, the program actually runs at that point!
So now I'm stumped. I have an application that builds, that seems to be having a permission error when I run it, but if I let the debugger attach then close it, it runs, and there's no Exception to really look at.
How I troubleshoot this issue?
Edit: Responding to Merlyn:
It's a custom app written from scratch in c#. The only dependency it has outside of core .NET namespaces is the Ionic.Zip DLL.
Visual Studio 2008 (Writing in C# 3.5)
Windows 7 - Home Premium, v6.1 build 7600
CPU - x64 quad core
CPU are you compiling under: Any CPU
I haven't tried it on another machine or a different version of VS.
Edit: I was able to try the compiled version on another win7 computer, and it worked without issue, so it looks like a security (?) issue on my computer only.
Try it in the debugger with Just My Code disabled and Native Code enabled, then check the call stack.
Also, what happens if you run it directly in Visual Studio?
Uncheck Enable Visual Studio Hosting Process in Project Properties and see whether it still works in VS.
I'd suggest sending the issue to Microsoft support. Especially with the data given here, you will have an easy time convincing them it's their problem. You might need an MSDN subscription for that.
I am currently adding a deployment project to my C# solution which
installs a windows service and I have been trying to find a property
that will make the installer prompt the user to reboot the system once
installation has completed. I would prefer to simply set a property
rather than create a small application that I run at the end of the
install.
if there is any code to restart then where i'll use this code
in installer class or elsewhere?
If you use a MSI-based installer (which would be the case if you're using a VS setup project), setting REBOOT=Force should do the trick.
Under normal circumstances, though, the installer will itself detect if a reboot is needed: if you're not currently getting a reboot prompt, that's a good indication your service should work just fine without that reboot.
You may be able to extend your setup logic to start the service after installing it (and also to launch any auto-start GUI components if required). That's much friendlier than forcing a reboot, and you'll do your bit to help Windows get rid of its "you moved your mouse, please reboot" image problem...
Edit (December 2011) #IdentityCrisisUK: see HOW TO: Control System Restarts in a Setup Project That You Created by Using Visual Studio .NET for the exact steps involved in setting the REBOOT variable. Use of Orca is required -- not sure why that has "already been ruled out", as it's a trivial postbuild step...
Use the REBOOT Property of WIX to restart prompt in the Product.wxs file of your Setup. Syntax is :-
<Property Id="REBOOT" Value="Force"></Property>