cefSharp causes the host application to crash if it cannot load its dependencies

[sylvain-hamel]

In our application, we are thorough with regards to exception handing. All unhandled exceptions that occur in our application are handled and logged (and reported to our servers for investigation). We never have any hard crash where Windows shows its own crash dialog.

After integrating cefSharp, we did some testing to make sure we could still handle all types of errors. One fairly simple test is to delete libcef.dll and start our application. The problem is that no exception is raised at all; our host process just crashes (and Windows does show its own crash dialog). This means there is no way for us to send this information to our servers.

We need cefSharp to be bullet proof in this area. Is there a way for cefSharp to handle all types of unmanaged errors (c++) to rethrow managed exceptions?

I'm willing to contribute in a fix but I don't really know where to start.

[numbersint]

AFAIK there is no way to catch DLLs load failures in .NET. Is this something you have working for other managed DLLs that go missing in your deployment? I would be interested in a solution because I get this problem with users' installations being corrupted too.

I think the more likely cause of crashes is in C# code. And if any exception occurs in Cef threads, e.g., a custom scheme handler, the process will immediately die. So I wrap my callbacks in a try/catch and pass the exception to the main thread for handling (so the CefSharp callback finishes cleanly).

[amaitland]

Closing this with #900, whilst it's not quite as I'd like it yet, it does allow you to check for dependencies on startup.