How to disable .NET Framework exception handling and use my own instead?

Question

I've developed a .NET 4 software and I'm ready to send it to beta users. If an unhandled exception is thrown in the software, I would like to catch it, log it and send the logs to me. I've already implemented this functionality and it seems to be running fine when I run it in debug mode with Visual Studio. However, when I've built a release version of the software and installed it, Microsoft .NET Framework starts to catch exceptions before my code. I get a popup with an error message: "Unhandled exception has occurred in a component in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue."

To test the crashing, I created a crash down button which throws an exception. This crash down logs itself and the exception handler logs all received unhandled exceptions. When I look at the log of the release version, I can only see the log message from crash down but not from the exception handler.

I've attached my own exception handler with this code:

AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += CurrentDomain_UnhandledException;

Is there some way to disable the exception catching of .NET Framework or is there a better way to attach my own exception handler?

UPDATE: I'm using WPF. I'll look into the DispatcherUnhandledException and let you know if it solves the problem.

UPDATE #2: Unfortunately adding handler to Application.Current.DispatcherUnhandledException didn't solve the problem. Apparently this debugging popup is created by JIT (Just-In-Time) debugger which is included with Visual Studio. I'll have to test the software with a "civilian" Windows and see if the exceptions are catched there too.

UPDATE #3: For some reason the Release built with Visual Studio works but the Release built with MSBuild scripts and Dotfuscator does not.

Answer 1

You haven't specified which framework you're using, but there are other "unhandled exception" events around.

For Windows Forms, there's Application.ThreadException.

For WPF/Silverlight there's Application.DispatcherUnhandledException.

Try one of those two first, and let us know if you're still having problems.