Windows Explored

This is a case where the Application Event logs came in handy when my application started to crash upon loading on our Windows 8.1 images. Since my app was compiled as .NET, the stack in the error details pointed me to problem object:

When TextBlock3 loaded it was doing Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(“SomeVariable”). The variable in question did not exist on our Windows 8.1 images. Although this did not seem to pose an issue for my Windows 7 dev box (it just would not display the TextBlock), Windows 8 will throw an exception if the variable does not exist and the app will crash. The likely cause my dev PC did not encounter this exception when running was because .NET framework 4.5 was not installed whereas .NET 4.5 is the default framework in Windows 8.