How To Solve " has had an error and needed to close. Send an error report."

Nick Gravelyn — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:40:31 GMT

A frequent problem found after distributing an XNA Game Studio game to another computer is double clicking the EXE only to get a window with this sort of message in it:

"<MyGame> has had an error and needed to close. Send an error report."

This message really could mean a couple of things:

You didn't actually run the redists described in the dependency FAQ: http://forums.xna.com/thread/9924.aspx. First thing you should do is run all of those redists. Don't assume they are installed; run the redists and they will install if needed.
There is an uncaught exception in your code.

To find out if there is an uncaught exception, follow these steps:

First, add a reference to System.Windows.Forms in your game project.
Next, in your Main method (found in Program.cs by default), wrap the entire code in a try/catch block that looks like this:

public static void Main()
{
    try
    {
        using (Game1 game = new Game1())
           game.Run();
    }

    catch (Exception e)
    {
        System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(e.ToString());
    }
}

Run your game again. You should see a window pop up with the exception details printed. Now you can use this information to fix the uncaught exceptions in your game. For more information on exceptions and try/catch blocks, see these sites:

http://www.csharp-station.com/Tutorials/Lesson15.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0yd65esw.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dszsf989(VS.71).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.exception.aspx

If, however, you run that code and don't see a window pop up with that information, that indicates you did not actually perform step 1 of installing the dependencies. Please use the link above to install the dependencies and run the game again.

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How To Solve " has had an error and needed to close. Send an error report."