.NET application silently fails to start when assembly missing

Question

I have a .NET C# winforms application which works great on my machine, but if I try to run it on another machine, it doesn't start up. No error message, no crash message, no window - nothing.

I've found that this always happens when a referenced assembly is missing. I guess this is .NET's general behavior and not specific to my app, is it?

Is there any way to configure .NET or my application such that it spits out a "referenced assembly missing" like error message in such cases?

Answer 1

This isn't normal. The app will die from an unhandled exception which triggers a Windows Error Report. I would have to guess that the target machine has WER disabled or replaced.