How to debug random crashes?

Question

we have a dotnet 2.0 desktop winforms app and it seems to randomly crash. no stack trace, vent log, or anything. it just dissapears.

There are a few theories:

1. machine simply runs out of resources. some people have said you will always get a window handle exception or a gdi exception but others say it might simply cause crashes.

2. we are using wrappers around non managed code for 2 modules. exceptions inside either of these modules could cause this behavior.

again, this is not reproducible so i wanted to see if there were any suggestions on how to debug better or anything i can put on the machine to "catch" the crash before it happens to help us understand whats going on.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to purchase John Robbins' book "Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications". Your question can go WAY deeper than we have room to type here.

Answer 2

Sounds for me like you need to log at first - maybe you can attach with PostSharp a logger to your methods (see Log4PostSharp) . This will certainly slow you down a lot and produce tons of messages. But you should be able to narrow the problematic code down ... Attach there more logs - remove others. Maybe you can stress-test this parts, later. If the suspect parts are small enough you might even do a code review there.
I know, your question was about debugging - but this could be an approach, too.