c# application working on development machine, fails on non-development machine

this problem has me baffled.

I'm writing an application which is supposed to take information from a form, pass it to a background worker which then a) writes the information to a local xml file and b) inserts the information into a remote MySQL database.

On my development machine, it seems to work flawlessly. The remote database is updated, the xml file is created if necessary and updated if it already exists. It's working.

Even if I exit out of the development environment and run the release build independantly of the IDE sandbox, the code works.

But, if I put it on another machine, the code fails and I dont understand why.

I'm currently using Visual Studio 2010 Professional on a 32 bit Windows 7 Ultimate machine.

At the moment, I'm finding that the application is stopping at a fairly specific point, which seems to be precisely where the background worker starts doing things like accessing the file system or accessing the remote database.

The project consists of a single exe file and a dll, which has a custom control I designed in it. The custom control is working fine, in that it shows what I want it to and returns the values I'm asking it to when I want it to, so it would seem that isn't to blame.

I initially thought I could be looking at a permissions problem, but running the application as administrator gets me the same response.

I've been writing using version 4 of the .NET framework, however I've just downgraded that to version 3.5 in the hopes that that may help. Both the non-development machines I've trie开发者_如何学编程d have been up to date - or have been brought up to date by me - prior to attempting to run the application.

I'm honestly baffled here. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Alan

If your code fails, it most likely means there is some uncaught exception. What you should do is to log all uncaught exceptions (and probably some of the caught too) to a file, possibly using something like log4net.

I don't think we can help you beyond that.

I have written a live logging utility called Donsole for diagnosing the application in such conditions. On the developer workstation, it is very easy to diagnose using the feature-rich debugger of VS. The utility app. helps the developers exactly in this kind of scenarios where they don't have any idea what's happening inside. I recommend you download the latest build and try it for yourself. Explaining how to use this utility and how it works is beyond the scope of this answer, so I'd forward you to the codeplex page of the project.

http://donsole.codeplex.com/

This is how it looks.

Take a look at the event viewer of your operating system. Administrative Tools>Event Viewer>Windows Log>Application.