Logging all yellow screen of deaths, even when its a compilation problem

Question

Earlier today we experienced a YSOD on one of our MVC sites running on IIS on Windows Server 2003.

Usually, these are reported via e-mail using ELMAH (using this setup), but since this was a compilation issue (of some sort), it did not get reported via e-mail.

The specific error was:

"The directory 'App_GlobalResources' is not allowed because the application is precompiled."

This is a major problem, since a potential customer could notice the problem before we do. How can we make sure these YSODs are logged, when the exception handler on the site is not called?

Answer 1

If you can, check the event viewer on that machine. This is the logger of last resort on a Windows machine.

Answer 2

It is possible to monitor the event log with VBScript. You could then email this when it occurs:

Here's an example:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/feb07/hey0226.mspx and email from vbscript: http://www.paulsadowski.com/WSH/cdo.htm

You could do this with powershell and/or another .net app on the box also.