How to avoid "program.exe has stopped working" window in release mode on windows?

Question

I'm working on the development of a software in C++ on Visual Studio 2010. As this software should be run on servers where human interaction is not available, I really really need to get rid of this "program.exe has stopped working" window that pops up in the release version in case of errors. I just want the program to terminate (maybe also give an error message, but not necessarily) and not have it remain blocked waiting for someone to click the "Close the program" button. I have to mention that I have 64 bit Windows 7 Professional on my machine.

I have read about several things, such as:

• the _set_abort_behavior function. This solves the case when abort() is called, but that is not the case for errors like "vector subscript out of range".

• I know I could be solving some of these errors by doing exception handling, but not all errors are exceptions, therefore this would not solve my entire problem.

• I've also read something about the Dr. Watson debugger, which is supposed to terminate the application silently, but I have the impression that this debugger is not available for Windows 7. Plus I don't know if this debugger would solve my problem in the release mode...

• I don't find that disabling Error Reporting on my entire machine is an elegant option, although I read that this could also be an alternative (not really one that I want to take).

How can I do this in Visual Studio? Are there any settings I could use?

Is there maybe a way to turn all errors in exceptions in Visual Studio, so that I can solve the problem with the exception handling mechanism? (please be tolerant if this was a stupid question)

I'm looking forward to your proposals. Many thanks for your time!

Best regards, Cornelia

Answer 1

A good way is to add your own unhandled exception filter (see SetUnhandledExceptionFilter() docs) and then write a log and a mini dump so that you can do whatever error handling you need to (eg close devices/handles) and you also have a crash dump that you can analyse later. Useful information in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1547251/188414

Answer 2

You can use

SetErrorMode(SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS | SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX);

MSDN documentation for SetErrorMode

You can also refer here

Hope this will solve your problem...