CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#silverlightexception
Ethan
Ethan

Reputation: 628

When does Silverlight show "Debugging resource strings are unavailable." message?

I have had a few reports of a message box showing up on application launch with the following contents:

[Arg_NullReferenceException]
Arguments:
Debugging resource strings are unavailable. Often the key and arguments provide
sufficient information to diagnose the problem. See http://go.microsoft...

I understand the link provided gives me the exception detail, and I obviously have a null ref somewhere. I haven't been able to reproduce this, so I am trying to find where this message is being thrown and hopefully add some error handling.

Is this specific message box something baked into Silverlight, or is it following whatever exception handling is in place when such an exception occurs? In the app constructor, I have

this.UnhandledException += this.Application_UnhandledException;

which is:

private void Application_UnhandledException(object sender,
    ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.ExceptionObject.Message + "\n" + e.ExceptionObject.StackTrace);
    }

So it looks like this message box is not coming from the Application_UnhandledException or it would have a message, newline, then a stack trace. So now my two options for how this message box is being generated are: 1) Silverlight is doing it in the background, or 2) this is coming from an existing catch block, although I have found none that would display in this way.

I'm doing offline caching of XAPs in Isolated Storage using OfflineCatalog, which involves some asynchronous WebClient downloads and fall-backs to Isolated Storage when requests fail. It makes sense that a null ref might be happening somewhere in this process.

To summarize, I'm wanting to add some exception handling for this Null Reference, but cannot reproduce it locally, and cannot find where it may be coming from. If this is coming from an unhandled exception, why does it not display the message and stack trace as specified?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 10535

Answers (1)

Lex Li
Lex Li

Reputation: 63203

The error message occurs if the machine does not have Silverlight SDK installed normally.

To debug similar browser side exceptions, it is common practice to use Visual Studio. If you cannot use VS, simply use WinDbg to attach to the browser process.

Upvotes: 1

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