Can a mistake in simple WPF programming trigger a blue screen?

Question

I was doing some .NET programming in WPF which involved reading .png and .txt files, placing images on a canvas, moving them around and then removing them and all of a sudden I get a bluescreen. I didn't think my little tinkering could cause a driver issue until I restarted and did the exact same thing with my program and I got another driver error. It seems that an intel graphics driver had failed and my resolution went way down. No bluescreen the second time, though. I was playing pretty fast and loose adding and removing elements from the children of the canvas. My question is, how could such simple programming cause such a serious error and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

As a first order approximation all bluescreens are caused by buggy drivers, and most driver bugs are race conditions. (see footnote 1) That is - it's not necessarily the specific operations, but the exact timing of them interacting with other things that are out of your control.

So if you can nail it down to a sequence of operations, then you can just avoid that sequence. but usually the only fix is to get better drivers - and not necessarily the latest drivers, sometimes its best to go back to an older set of drivers.

footnotes:

1 Of course, not all bluescreens are drivers, but they are all from kernel mode, it should never be possible for user mode code to make calls that crash in kernel mode, so when you hit a bluescreen, you have found a bug in some component that runs in kernel mode. A bluescreen is by definition not your bug (2) (or not only your bug).

2 unless you write drivers.

Answer 2

It sounds like you have a buggy graphics driver. WPF by itself cannot trigger a blue screen -- but WPF does call DirectX, which in turn calls the graphics driver -- and if the graphics driver contains bugs, those can cause a blue screen.

You cannot fix this at the WPF level, because WPF is innocent in this particular problem. You need to update your graphics driver. A possible workaround if there are no updates or the latest version doesn't fix it is to disable hardware acceleration for WPF, as this may avoid hitting the buggy bit of the driver.