Visual Studio no longer associated with application crashes

Question

Hi, When I first installed Visual Studio 2008 on my machine, crashes from applications would present me with a dialog to debug the application in Visual Studio. This was perfect.

Recently however my Visual Studio installation has become unassociated with application crashes. Instead I get a dialog which attempts to file the application crash report to Microsoft. This is very frustrating, as in many cases I do not have time to manually attach Visual Studio as a debugger prior to the application crash.

I do not know why this behaviour has changed, but does anyone know how to reassociate Visual Studio with application crashes?

Answer 1

I'm not sure why the association went away, but maybe try these instructions to fix it:

To enable/disable Just-In-Time debugging

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. In the Options dialog box, select the Debugging folder.
3. In the Debugging folder, select the Just-In-Time page.
4. In the Enable Just-In-Time debugging of these types of code box, select or clear the relevant program types: Managed, Native, or Script. (To disable Just-In-Time debugging, once it has been enabled, you must be running with Administrator privileges. Enabling Just-In-Time debugging sets a registry key, and Administrator privileges are required to change that key.)
5. Click OK.

Answer 2

I have found a workaround.

If I click the button to show the crash report details, there is a ".mdmp" file mentioned. I can copy this to a safe location prior to dismissing the dialog, then open this minidump in Visual Studio.

Answer 3

Somewhat related to this topic: There is an explanation on how to entirely remove crash dialogs (even the ones not related to Visual Studio) in this link.

I mention it because i found this StackOverflow question while looking for an answer to that one.