Generating .NET crash dumps automatically

Note that creating a minidump from inside the "failing" process (or even thread) itself is not trivial or might not be accurate (also MiniDumpWriteDump function's Remarks).

Besides, if your process is in such anger that you might need to write a crash dump, the whole situation is typically so hosed, that even attempting to create a crash dump could cause another crash (situations like hangs aside - but those might be even harder to "catch" from within the current process).

The "best" thing you can do, if you cannot install separate applications on your client's systems, is to start an external process (which could also fail in critical situations!) and let that create a crashdump from your current process (see Superassert.NET from John Robbins). You could even go so far, as to put the external binary into your app resources, extract it from there on startup (as to minimize failure in critical situtations) to disk (if you dare).

You can configure Windows Error Reporting (WER) to create a crash dump in a specific directory using the following registry script:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps]
"DumpFolder"="C:\\Dumps"
"DumpCount"=dword:00000064
"DumpType"=dword:00000002
"CustomDumpFlags"=dword:00000000

The dump will go into C:\Dumps with a name that reflects the name of the process that crashed. DumpType=2 gives a full memory dump. DumpType=1 gives a mini dump. On 64 bit machines, you do not need to put these under the Wow32 nodes. WER only uses the non-WOW registry key specified above.

Depending on the type of crash, this method may not work. I have yet to figure out why or which crash types it doesn't catch. Anyone?