WinForm application doesn't start outside Visual Studio 2010

Question

I have a WinForm application written with VS2008 and .NET 3.5. This application runs well from Visual Studio 2008 and outside (when VS2008 is closed, simple double-click on the EXE boots the application).

I decided this morning to migrate everything to VS2010 and .NET 4 (updated the target framework). Everything compiles and the application runs from VS2010 (click on the play button - in debug as well as in release). However, when I try to launch the application from explorer.exe, I see "Blabla has stopped working... Windows is checking...".

How can I debug such issue? I cannot attach the debugger since the application is not even started.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since it doesn't start, check that the needed libraries (.DLLs) are in directories in PATH. If you can't tell, open a cmd prompt, cd to the DLL directory, c:\fullpath\to\myprogram and see if it will start. If so, then it's just that the DLLs aren't being found.

Answer 2

I would say this problem is due to some DLLs missing but those are in the path you might want to try doing follwing:

1) add UnhandledException hanlder if you don't have it yet

AppDomain currentDomain = AppDomain.CurrentDomain;
currentDomain.UnhandledException += new UnhandledExceptionEventHandler(MyHandler);

more details here AppDomain UnhandledException Event

2) add logging and dump your application initialisation steps into the text file. This might give you an idea which one (if any) fails