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I Cant Run EXE File Outside of Visual Studio

I appreciate that this question has probably been answered before, but I can't find the solution to my problem.
This is that I can't run my C# program by double clicking it in windows explorer. I have tried to run the release and debug versions, but no luck. The program runs without errors or warnings inside VS. I have tried completely rewriting my project in a different solution and it still doesn't work. When I do try to run it, it uses about 75MB in the RAM but then closes. A window comes up saying "Sending information to Microsoft".
Thanks in advance.
Edit:
I've tried making another project with just a form and nothing else
It runs ok inside VS but when I run the executable from windows explorer it launches but comes up with "GUI has stopped working" when you click on the close button. GUI is the name of the app. This happens with all of the projects that I make from now.

It sounds as if you are missing something vital which your EXE depends on. It is present when you run the application from the IDE, but not when you run it from Explorer.
Are you running it from the directory which it got compiled to? This is normally under your project, under "bin\Debug" or "bin\Release". If not, then the odds are that you are missing a file which is in that folder. Copy all the files (and any subfolders) to where your EXE lives, and that should fix the issue.
Another possibility is that you need a file which the IDE can find, but Windows cannot.
Debugging issues which cause a crash without a callstack are always tricky. I'd suggest that you add some logging to your app, so you can see what is going on prior to the crash. If the issue is caused by your code, then logging will help to find it.
Or, even quicker and dirtier, throw up a messagebox before every line. Give each one a unique message, and you can then investigate the code around the area of the last messagebox that you see before the crash.

It turns out, there was a problem with visual studio or windows. I was running a version of windows 10 but after the update that came on the 06/01/16 it works OK now.
My guess is that it was a problem with the universal windows extension in visual studio
Update:
As of about 7 months later visual studio is working very well on my new computer with windows 10. I also use the latest version on vs which may have been my problem Because my old machine was that: old. It may not have been compatible with the latest software.

Process returns exit code -532462766 in Windows 8.1 [duplicate]

I've built a .NET Windows Forms application in Visual Studio 2010. I also built a corresponding setup/install package via Visual Studio 2010. This is built as a 32-bit (x86) application. (We make use of third-party Windows Forms controls that are 32-bit only).
I am able to run the setup package and deploy successfully to other Windows 7 64-bit environments and 32 bit Windows XP boxes. The installed application runs fine on these.
However, when I attempt to run Windows Server 2008 R2 - 64 bit, the application crashes at startup. It installed successfully via the installer without any errors.
It appears to crash when loading the application. I put a message box as the first line in the application to see if it got past loading. The message box doesn't show up, so I assume that it occurs during loading/init of the application.
So far I haven't found much to go on. From the Details I see the following:
Exception Code: E0434352
I've fished around/googled to see if there was anything obvious, but I saw nothing. I saw some references to a possible stack overflow in the CLR.
The Windows Forms application is built with the following references:
DevExpress
Infragistics Winforms controls
ORACLE DataAccess DLL
RabbitMQ
What is the issue?
How do I approach figuring this out?
How do I debug to get more useful information?

If you are getting that error from Event Viewer, you should see another error event (at least one) from the Source ".NET Runtime". Look at that error message as it will contain the Exception info.

0xE0434352 is the exception code for all .NET exceptions so that won't tell you much. How did you got this exception code? The event log?
Your best bet is to use a debugger to get more information. If the Visual Studio debugger won't help you, then you might need to check out WinDbg with SOS. See here and here for an introduction. Let it break on the exception, and see if you can get more information on the why.
If you suspect it is an issue when loading assemblies you might want to check out the Fusion Log.

I'm not sure if this will help anyone or not, but since it was my problem, I figure it's worth mentioning:
I was getting this error, and it turned out to be a problem with the platform for which the EXE was built. We had it building for x86, and it needed to be x64, because of an Oracle reference in the project. When we made that change, the problem went away. So, see if you have any similar conflicts.

It looks like this error 0xe0434352 applies to a number of different errors.
In case it helps anyone, I ran into this error when I was trying to install my application on a new Windows 10 installation. It worked on other machines, and looked like the app momentarily would start before dying. After much trial and error the problem turned out to be that the app required DirectX9. Though a later version of DirectX was present it had to have version 9. Hope that saves someone some frustration.

I was fighting with this a whole day asking my users to run debug versions of the software. Because it looked like it didn't run the first line. Just a crash without information.
Then I realized that the error was inside the form's InitializeComponent.
The way to get an exception was to remove this line (or comment it out):
System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThrough()
Once you get rid of the line, you'll get a normal exception.

I was getting this when the app deployed. In my case, I chose "This is a full trust application" on the project security tab, and that fixed it.

Issue:
.Net application code aborts before it starts its execution [Console application or Windows application]
Error received: Aborted with Error code "E0434352"
Exception: Unknown exception
Scenario 1:
When an application is already executed, which have used some of the dependent resources and those resources are still in use with the application executed, when another application or the same exe is triggered from some other source then one of the app throws the error
Scenario 2:
When an application is triggered by scheduler or automatic jobs, it may be in execution state at background, meanwhile when you try to trigger the same application again, the error may be triggered.
Solution:
Create an application, when & where the application release all its resources as soon as completed
Kill all the background process once the application is closed
Check and avoid executing the application from multiple sources like Batch Process, Task Scheduler and external tools at same time.
Check for the Application and resource dependencies and clean up the code if needed.

To fix the issue for me (as a number of applications started to throw this exception all of a sudden, for example, CorelDraw X6 being one), I uninstalled the .NET 4.5 runtime and installed the .NET 4 runtime. The two versions cannot be installed side by side, but they use the same version numbers in the GAC. This causes issues as some of the functions have been depreciated in 4.5.
DLL Hell has returned...

We got this error when the connection string to our database was incorrect. The key to figuring this out was running the dotnet blah.dll which provided a stacktrace showing us that the sql server instance specified could not be found. Hope this helps someone.

So.. I had noticed in event viewer that this crash corresponded to a "System.IO.FileNotFoundException" error.
So I fired ProcMon and noticed that one of the program dlls was failing to load vcruntime140.
So I simply installed vs15 redist and it worked.

I know this is a somewhat old thread, but I had this problem too with a c#/WPF app I was creating. The app worked fine on the development machine, but would not start on the test machine. The Application Log in the Event Viewer gave a somewhat nebulous .NET Runtime error of System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException.
I tried using some debugging software but the app would not stay running long enough to attach the debugger to the process. After banging my head against my desk for a day and looking at many web pages like this one, what I wound up doing to troubleshoot this was to install VS2019 on my test machine. I then dragged the .exe file from its folder (it was deep in the Users[user]\AppData\Apps\2.0... folder) to the open VS2019 instance and went to start it from there. Immediately, it came up with a dialog box giving the exception and the cause.
In my case, when I added an icon to one of the forms, the complete path to the icon was placed into the XAML instead of just the icon name. I had copied the icon file into the project folder, but since the project folder does not exist on the test machine, this was the root cause of the error. I then removed the path from the XAML, leaving just the icon name one, rebuilt the solution and re-published it, and it ran just fine on the test machine now. Of course there are many causes besides what gave me the error, but this method of troubleshooting should hopefully identify the root cause of the error, since the Windows Event Viewer gives a somewhat vague answer.
To summarize, use Visual Studio on the test machine as a debugger of sorts. But, to get it to work right, I had to drag the .exe file into the IDE and Start (run) it from there.
I believe this will also work with VS2017 as well as VS2019. Hopefully this helps someone who is still having this issue.

When running a command line application it would immediately exit, and I saw this exception in the Event Viewer but received no other feedback. In my case, running the command prompt as administrator solved the problem.
I believe one of the takeaways from this is simply that you may get this exception due to a permission issue.
A few hours later we had the identical exception with a newer version of the console application for a different reason. This time it turned out to be a dll version incompatibility. Using the required newer dll version solved the problem.
Perhaps this generic error comes up due to code that is not handling exceptions gracefully; with the best fix likely being to handle exceptions at least well enough to provide better error messages.

In my case, I was out of memory and my Windows System paging file was disabled. After re-enabling it the error went away.
In order to change the paging file settings:
Click Start, type Advanced System Settings into the Start menu and press Enter to open it.
Click the Settings button under performance.
Click over to the Advanced tab and click the Change button in the Virtual memory section.

.NET C# App running good on Development PC but doesn't run on Production computer

So it's basically as stated in the title. I've created a WPF app in Visual Studio 2013 using some external libraries.
Application works flawlessly on my Development machine (Windows 8.1 x64 + Visual Studio 2013) but doesn't run at all on Production device (Tablet with Windows 8 (NOT 8.1)). App is developed under .NET 4.5, doesn't matter if I try to run Debug or Release version. The proccess just hangs a while and then closes without any errors or messages.
If anyone would know what to do or how to fix this I would be very happy.
Thanks in advance :).

The first thing too look up in this situation, would be the Windows event log. When a .NET application crashes badly, the .NET Runtime will log an event there.
Most of the time, these events will log the stack trace which lead to the crash. This will give you a hint as to what happened.
Such logs are found in the "Application" category, and the source name you need to look for is ".NET Runtime". Usually, there will be another entry with the source name "Application Error", but this one is much less likely to help you.
Another useful technique, is to add a Console.WriteLine call at the start of your program, in order to see if that line gets to run at all.
Depending on what you find using these techniques, you may also want to use tools such as Dependency Walker or ILSpy, as suggested by Mike Dinescu.

Most likely a binding error occurs at start-up but the production machine you're testing on is configured to silently report these errors and it doesn't display the typical dialog box that would inform you that the process crashed.
Don't fret though, that message would probably not help you too much anyway.
What you need to do is inspect the main executable with a tool that can generate a dependency tree and figure out which DLLs are missing. Most likely these will be native binaries, not managed. The usual suspects are the VC runtime, or MFC or ATL libraries but there could be others too. That's why you need to use a tool such as DependencyWalker or RedGate's Reflector to find all dependencies for the main executable.

It is because your external libraries are not compiled into final .exe file. So you either need to include them in the same folder or merge them into exe but this process can be quite tricky. Look for ILMerge. However it is way easier to just copy them with your exe file.

Can't built my Console Application

From time to time I receive this error message when I'm debugging my Console Application:
The process cannot access the file 'bin\Release...' because it is
being used by another process. Exceeded retry count of 10. Failed.
The fact is that it's not running and Visual Studio keeps showing this message, and so I have to restart it and build it again.
The process is NOT running, so there is no reason to receive this error.
Does anyone know why this is happening?

Verify that nothing has changed the file permissions, and the file isn't read-only. Verify that you cannot delete the file yourself. If so then yes, something is blocking it.
Download handle.exe, which is a command-line tool that shows you what process is locking a file.
If handle.exe says nothing is using your file, or it says devenv.exe is using it, then I think you have hit that intermittent bug in Visual Studio. Your only option is to restart Visual Studio. If you do a google search for "used by another process" with site:connect.microsoft.com you will find that this bug gets reported, then fixed, then reported, then fixed - over many years. Personally, I have had this happen most often on VS2010 using WPF projects. It has yet to happen to me on VS2013. So upgrading might help.
Here is my Google search.

If the process is not running, I suppose Visual studio is the process that uses bin\Release.
If you want to know exactly what the problem is, delete everything in the folder (if possible), the file that will not be deleted will be the one that is used by Visual Studio, this will already be a good indicator.

I'm not sure why you are debugging the release build?
When this happens, it usually is due to being opened i.e. the console window that has ran the app is still open, or it is still in the process of closing.
However, again I feel it's due to debugging a release built application.

I had a similar issue in the last couple of days. The reason this happened to me is because I was testing a Windows Service I created. When I forgot to stop the service, and tried to build, I got this error.
Follow the suggestions in the other posts. As well, you may want to download Process Explorer from Microsoft - It might give you additional insight and allow you to kill any linger process.

What version of Visual Studio? You tagged it as VS 2013, correct?
Did you look at the following threads at Microsoft? Many complaining about similar issue.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/533411
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/811846/visual-sudio-cant-complie
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/647826

C# App runs in Visual Studio but after I build it crashes on execution?

I'm coding an application on C#, and it runs perfectly fine when I click the "Run" button in Visual Studio C# Express 2010. But, when I go to Debug -> Build Solution, after I run the .exe file, it says "XXX.EXE has stopped working..."
I have inserted break-points and commented out chunks of my code, rebuilt the project, and ran again to try to isolate the problem, but I can't figure out what is causing this. The fact that it runs fine in debug mode is strange.

Some things to try:
Check the system Event log for ASP.NET errors.
Try setting the build to Release mode and using Run--no debugging. See if it crashes then. Watch the Output and other windows for any errors during/after the crash. Depending on those results, check that your solution and project properties are correct in both Debug and Release configurations.
You can also build in debug mode, launch it externally, than attach the Visual Studio debugger to the process. But of course if it crashes on startup than that won't work.
You can add Debug.Assert lines to see if you can get one of those to throw.
Wrap your code in a big try/catch and make sure your catch handler somehow reports or logs the full exception for you.
Adding logging would be good idea. You can log to a file or the system event log. I suggest log4net or similar logging tool for that.

I just had this issue and was going to see if I could catch when the error happened via a console window, when I changed my app to console based the program stopped crashing, I commented out all Console writes and set it back into a windows forms app and voila, runs fine now.
-I know its an old post, but its open and unanswered so I think its fair game.

Try adding your application to your Antivirus Whitelist or exclusion list. This is a known problem with McAfee and Avast!

I may be misunderstanding the problem, but if you are trying to run your app from its .exe file (originally located at Visual Studio ####\Projects\ProjectName\bin\x86\Debug\ProjectName.exe), you must make sure that that .exe file is in that original directory. You cannot move it. I ran into a similar problem with XNA projects. If you want to move the.exe file somewhere else, you can create a shortcut to it, but don't ever move it. If you try and run it from a different location, or if you move any of the other files from that directory, you'll get an error message exactly like the one you described.
Also note that some Visual Studio projects (like XNA ones) will not run as standalones. Building the projects doesn't export them into a standalone format, they can only run on computers that have VS and all the projects framework installed, and their .exe file must remain in its original place.