I have a .NET app impossible to debug because when I install the SDK it works. Any suggestions?

Question

I have a .NET application that regularly works on all the machines with .NET installed.

When I try to launch it on a PC with no .NET framework installed this happens: it opens, i can change tab (my app has 4 tabs), it reads the computer IP without any problem, but then crashes somewhere when it receives a message from another terminal (i have a terminal that communicates with the PC via ETH-TCP/IP).

The message I get is just: DESCRIPTION: stopped working.

The big deal is that I cannot debug it because if I install the .NET framework it magically works like a charm. Obviously I'm asking this because we prefer not to install .NET on all the machines in the office (they run different Windows versions and plenty of them don't have the .NET installed).

My question can be similar to this one, but in my case the .exe starts (as I explained above).. the crash comes when I start the communication between the PC and the terminal.

Anybody has a hint for my problem? Thank you

EDIT : thank you for the answers, in the end I decided to do Remote Debugging by running the app on a virtual machine with no .NET at all. Now, when it crashes, I can catch the bad instructions inside VS2010 installed on the host machine. Btw, the problem was on a .dll that couldn't be loaded

Answer 1

You must have the .NET Framework installed on a machine in order to run a .NET application. The .NET Framework is both a runtime and the SDK, not just an SDK. All versions beyond Windows XP come with some version of the .NET Framework installed.

If you are saying that installing Visual Studio corrects the issue (which is what the question you linked to describes), that is a different problem altogether. Unfortunately, your question doesn't provide enough information to troubleshoot it. You can check the Event Viewer on the machine experiencing the issue, then look for two errors next to each other in the Application event log. One of these errors will contain exception detail, which will aid us (or you) in tracking down the problem.