I'm developing a commercial Windows 7 desktop application (somewhat shrink wrap, but not quite). The application has both Windows Service and a WPF User Interface components. In the event that our application fails at a customer site we want to be able to capture information about the runtime environmnent, including a crash dump of our processes to a dump location. That information could then be forwared to our support personnel upon request for further investigation. We also want to turn off any Windows Error Reporting and Send To Microsoft dialogs that might popup as a result of the failure.
The important thing is that we only want this to affect our application processes. We don't want to affect some global setting that will change the way all other applications on the customers desktop report fatal errors.
I'm looking for some suggestions and best practices for doing this sort of thing in a shrink wrap application.
The best way I know how to do this is by subscribing to the AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException event. There you will be able to use the Win32 API function MiniDumpWriteDump to create your own minidump file. Check out this blog post to see a good example. Also, there is the ClrDump library.
Before you exit from your UnhandledException handler, call Environment.Exit() and you shouldn't see any more Windows error dialogs.
I have not actually used these minidump libraries myself yet, but I will soon. Hopefully this answer will at least give you a few keywords that you can plug into Google.