How to analyse WERInternalMetadata.xml file generated by Windows Crash Reporter?

Question

A .Net 4.0 app keeps crashing for a user, but just for him, I could not reproduce the bug. He attached the WERInternalMetadata.xml file generated by the Windows

Answer 1

Firstly, here's what's in that WER trace:

rstvshowtracker.exe - your exe
1.0.3842.33258 - version of your exe
4c374e79 - exe timestamp
mscorlib - assembly / module
4.0.0.0 - assembly version
4ba1da6f - assm timestamp
1620 - methodDef token of faulting method 
14 - IL offset of faulting instruction
System.IO.FileNotFoundException - exception

You could use WinDBG and SOS to find out what that method is (e.g. 1620). See the example here on how to do it: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oanapl/archive/2009/01/30/windows-error-reporting-wer-and-clr-integration.aspx

...Alternatively, you could hook up the unhandledException event in your application, and print out the exception stack trace to a log file, to see what caused the issue; e.g.

static void MyHandler(object sender, UnhandledExceptionEventArgs args) 
{
   Exception e = (Exception) args.ExceptionObject;
   // print out the exception stack trace to a log
}

public static void Main() 
{
   AppDomain currentDomain = AppDomain.CurrentDomain;
   currentDomain.UnhandledException += new UnhandledExceptionEventHandler(MyHandler);
}