I'm developing WPF textual testing application.
Everything is OK, but sometimes my app stops responding.
Using Process Explorer I've found out that there's a problem in wpfgfx_0400.dll. Moreover, in most of cases entire OS could stop responding after a while. I think it could be video layer (driver?) issue, because music continue playing.
All windows/.net/video driver updates are installed. Windows7x64, .NET4.0, Radeon HD7700
What could be the problem?
From my experience, such errors are almost always a driver issue. You can try to verify that this is hardware/driver related problem by forcing wpf to software render mode - see this answer and this answer for more info on how to do it. If you don't have any problems in software mode then it's a driver issue, so you can try some older driver versions and see if it goes away.
Related
We have a higher-end Win7-64 Dell precision workstation notebook with an i7, 8 gigs of ram, tons of hd space and running dedicated AMD graphics. The machine is about a month old. It was one of the highest-end we could get at the time.
What we're experiencing is when we run our WPF/SQL Server (local) app, it tends to hang and stall, sometimes completely crashing, but mostly just hanging until we force it to close. However, the exact same installer running in a VMware virtual machine running on that same machine runs flawlessly. Actually, the VM install runs better than a lot of native installs on other machines. It's very snappy with no hangs or hesitations at all. But again, same app, same installer running direct in the OS, and we're back to the issues above.
We've ran all Windows updates.... we've tried completely reinstalling everything... .NET frameworks, SQL Server, video drivers, even updated the BIOS and checked for rogue services but it still happens.
At first we thought it was Symantec AV's real-time protection because when we first shut that off, things started getting snappy again (and slowed down and froze when it auto-re-enabled itself furthering this hypothesis) but then it just started slowing down again, and more surprising, that same AV is running in the VM without issue! Checked the exceptions but there weren't any.
We even tried forcing WPF to run in software-render mode but again, nothing.
Now the odd thing is this only seems to be happening on this and a few other machines, but we can't seem to find anything in common except they're all running Win7 64-bit. As such, we have absolutely no idea where to start. And since most are hangs, not crashes, we can't even look at the crash reports.
So can anyone give us any idea what else we can look at? This is holding up us shipping a three-years-in-the-making major release of our software so to say this is a show-stopper would be an understatement. We've been stumped for about a month now and getting nowhere fast.
Found it!! Turns out there's a bug in .NET 4.0 regarding UI Automation and the changes MS introduced. Here's the info, and the fix! (Note: Even if you call MS, they will send you a link, but it's always a broken link. I managed to track this down manually.)
Note: Their article talks about a specific case that causes this behavior, but if you google around, you'll see tons of issues around hangs related to those DLLs. The latest is they're promising a fix in the .NET 4.5 runtime (from a MS post on this issue.)
Here's the KB article...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2484841/en-us
...and here is the actual hotfix.
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/KB2484841/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5583
Apparently the VM didn't suffer from this. We weren't sure if the VM had the hotfix applied or not or if this only happens on non-virtualized machines. Still, this solved all of the issues and the app is now snappy again. (Man, was this fun to track down! Ugh!!)
I just discovered this problem today, and I had no idea what caused this problem. My project had been developed for few months.
I have a project(solution), with several projects in there, it works well if I write and debug, by pressing F5.
The problem occur is when I press Ctrl+F5 (to skip debug mode), or run directly from double click the exe, it crashed. The errors dialogs that pop up every times are different, but OutOfMemoryException is the most frequent one.
I had checked to make sure all my projects are .Net 3.5
I put a MessageBox.Show("something") at the beginning of my main project constructor, but it never reach.
I use some registry cleaner to clean/fix my registry, scan for viruses.
I had try to read the meaning of each error and exception, but still no clue why it happen.
These are a series of screenshots if I press Ctrl + F5. (FutureGenerator is some random name I gave to my project.)
Series of screenshot if I run the app from my debug folder, FutureGenerator.exe
I suspect this is caused by framework crashed during Windows Update, but I removed those update that I performed recently, still same. The exe file works on other non development PC, but I don't want to reformat my PC or reinstall my VS, yet, because it's a painful process.
Any idea, anyone?? Million thanks.
You mention v3.5 but the very first screenshot is about v4.
Try repairing your Framework 4 and/or VS2010
I found the problem. It's actually because I added FutureGenerator.exe into Application Verifier by Microsoft. The verifier only support debugging testing.
After I removed FutureGenerator.exe from the Application Verifier, everything's ok.
I have registered my Phone 7 app as a Share Picker Extension. It works—my app is in the list of Share options and it gets launched and I can load the chosen image. Okay, great.
But then things go wrong in my code. I would like to be able to debug the issues, but I can't seem to keep the debugger attached.
I cannot debug this in the simulator, since the Pictures app (and thus the Share Picker functionality) is not present in the simulator.
I cannot debug this on the phone because as soon as I pick my app from the Share list, the debugger detaches... right as my app is "launching" again.
Is it possible to attach the debugger to a running WP7 app? Is it possible to keep the debugger attached? Am I doing it wrong? Any suggestions, advice or guesses are welcome because I'm tearing my hair out.
When doing M+V hub integration (sorry, haven't done any pictures hub integration yet) I initially used a crude debug technique (Messagebox.Show, etc. - like Justin mentioned) to verify what was being passed to the NavigationEventArgs of OnNavigatedTo and wrapped the whole method in a try..catch block to learn what was going on. I then refactored the code when I knew what could be expected. (Remember OnNavigatedTo will be called when your app is launched normally too and so e won't be populated in the same way.)
When the app is launched from a/the hub it creates a new instance of the app and there is currently no way to connect to this for debugging while the main page is being navigated to.
Great question. I'm unsure if that's possible. As far as I know, there's no way to attach the debugger to when the WP7 O/S starts an app (which wasn't triggered by the debugger).
Photo Share picker extensibility, music+Video hub extensibility and other O/S extensibility points seem to not play nicely with the VS debugger. Normally I resort to MessageBox.Show to debug any problems with WP7 O/S integration.
1) Connect the Device
2) Turn off Zune
3) Start C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x86\WPConnect.exe
To properly debug your application that uses the Media Library, you'll need to use the Windows Phone Connect Tool (WPConnect.exe) as described on MSDN. Jaime has some additional tips on his blog.
Once you are connected, you should be able to debug your application. Fingers crossed anyway. If that doesn't help, I'll dig a bit further.
It's not so much about the WPConnect tool. The nature of your application means that you have to have it closed and the user should pick a photo. Only after that the data is returned to the application.
You should read about the application execution model on Windows Phone 7. Also a good explanation is available here.
Initially, I would say that you should look at tombstoning (a good explanation here) but then again, the image returned will re-start the app and won't allow you to directly attach the debugger.
Yeah, looks like this is impossible...
All the answers above seem to be missing the point: I presume you're able to debug your app in the "standalone" mode (when it's launched normally), but not when it's launched via the Share Picker Extension. Am I write? This is the wall I'm hitting... :-(
I thought the proper way would be to attach to the process once it's launched.
I tried to use Debug > Attach to Process, then select Smart Device as the Transport and Windows Phone Device as the Qualifier... But in return I get the ugly "Unable to connect to 'Windows Phone Device'. Not implemented" message.
Bummer :-(
I've been working on this problem on and off for about a month. I don't expect anybody to be able to give me a definitive answer. I'm just completely out of ideas at this point and could use anything.
The problem is that my app crashes on only some models of phones. I have an HTC surround and it runs fine. It has also been tested on a Samsung Focus and it works there to. It crashes pretty consistently on a HTC mozart. There are other phones it crashes on but I don't know what models they are. I don't have access to an HTC mozart so debugging has been very difficult.
I'm handling the application UnhandledException event and I have try catch around every background thread. The error handling code never runs.
What I know:
Sometimes it freezes and requires a press of the power button. At least once it required the battery taken out. Most of the time it freezes and then crashes.
Most of the time it crashes on the main menu, before everything displays.
It's not 100% consistent. Sometimes it works for a little bit, but never very long.
It's not because it's out of memory. Most of the time it crashes while using less then 8MB.
When all the exception handling didn't work I added debug logging. This slows things way down but at the same time the issue goes away.
These symptoms make it sound like a deadlock to me. Although I have gone over the code and there is no thread ever entering more then 1 lock at a time.
Any ideas on how I should track this down would be appreciated.
Edit: This is a WP7 version of my game. I've just been able to confirm with a volunteer with an HTC mozart that the simplest conversion of the code meant for to run on the web will crash on the phone. That's code has no networking, isolated storage, or sound.
I also should have mentioned that this has passed certification and was in the marketplace for a few days until I took it down because it got bad reviews (because it was unplayable for some people)
If the devices are locking up, then my suspicions would be to look at the areas where you are closest to the driver level/hardware, which (looking at your game) are:
the display
the sound
It could also be just about due to processing/CPU activity - but generally "User level" code shouldn't be able to lock up your phone - that functionality is reserved for kernel software.
The only way of really testing this is to get hold of a device where this "reliably crashes" (e.g. a Mozart) and to go through the process of disabling bits of functionality one by one.
If this is a Silverlight app, then I'd expect Microsoft to want to help - I'd contact them via AppHub and via their local Evangelist team - they'll have the means and the motivation to assist you.
I'm happy to assist on testing on a developer-unlocked HTC Trophy if that helps!
The only thing I can think of that's unique to the Mozart is that it has an 8MP camera and all others have a 5MP camera.
Are you using a CameraCaptureTask and expecting the returned image to be a certain size?
Other than that, what does the app do? what services and device functionality are you using?
Do you have any network access running on a background thread?
I had roughly the same problem when developing my WP7 app. As far as I can tell it isn't as much model bound as it is device bound. In fact I had my app deployed to 15+ Trophy's (my company gave all their employees one of those) and it would repeatedly crash on some of them all having the same firmware. Some of the feedback I got through the reviews seems to indicate that it also happens in the wild.
In my case the crash occurs primarily (only?) when the app is launched. There does seem to be a strong correlation between internet connectivity and crashing in that I can 'recreate' the crash by putting my phone in flight mode, unplugging the network cable from my computer and then deploying the app. In that case too it immediately crashes and no event or break point is ever raised.
My gut feeling tell me it might have something to do with the map control as that does tend to respond funky to poor connectivity when the application is loading (like displaying an error message that the card cant be loaded while simultaneously displaying the map)
Does your app also use the Map Control (in combination with a Pivot control perhaps?)
Some of the devices have issues where you need set things to "content" instead of "embedded resource" in your project.
Although i've more heard about that issue related to app startup time, as on some devices (HD7?) the load of the app was taking enough time that the app was never allowed to start, the OS thought it was taking too long and killed it.
I have several applications in WPF that periodically crash on 2 different servers (a dell poweredge and a HP proliant). The problem is that the WPF applications both crash within d3d9.dll. Rebooting the servers always fixes the problem. The problem only occurs a few times a month. Both servers are running Windows XP instead of Windows 2003.
Here is the event viewer application log entry for the crash
Faulting application iqlayer.exe, version 5.3.1.14, stamp 4a9d0d63, faulting module d3d9.dll, version 5.3.2600.2180, stamp 41109693, debug? 0, fault address 0x0003a756.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Once this problem occurs, all further WPF applications will not run until I reboot. I even tried running a test application which showed a blank window. The test app crashed immediately on start at d3d9.dll.
I found this KB which i think is related to my problem. However, i didnt install directX SDK on my server and dont know where to uncheck "Break on D3D9 Error".
Did you upgrade your video card drivers to the latest version?
I reckon there is no answer. I have rebooted the server and cant reproduce the problem :(