Have you every used MvvmCross in your app, only for it to crash on startup when launching without the debugger? Well it happened for me quite a few times, and its because I was having a brain fart…

After launching the app many times and trying to somehow gain knowledge magically due to repeating the same thing over and over, I decided to add some “logging”:

    // Code to execute if a navigation fails
    private void RootFrame_NavigationFailed(object sender, NavigationFailedEventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.Exception.ToString()); // <- LOGGING!
        if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
        {
            // A navigation has failed; break into the debugger
            System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
        }
    }

    // Code to execute on Unhandled Exceptions
    private void Application_UnhandledException(object sender, ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.ExceptionObject.ToString()); // <- LOGGING!
        if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
        {
            // An unhandled exception has occurred; break into the debugger
            System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
        }
    }

This returns a nice little error message:

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
  at Cirrious.CrossCore.Mvx.Resolve[TService]()
  at MvvmCrossSample.WindowsPhone.App.<RootFrameOnNavigating>b__0()

So what does that mean? Well, over there I am trying to resolve the IMvxAppStart type:

RootFrame.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => { 
    Mvx.Resolve<IMvxAppStart>().Start();
});

So for some reason, my Setup object wasn’t getting initialized… This is what I had:

    // Show graphics profiling information while debugging.
    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        // ...

        Setup setup = new Setup(RootFrame);
        setup.Initialize();
    }

Hmm… Maybe the app should start up for the users without debuggers as well? All I needed to do was to move the startup object out of the scope of the if block:

    // Show graphics profiling information while debugging.
    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        // ...
    }

    Setup setup = new Setup(RootFrame);
    setup.Initialize();

After that, the app worked fine.

In short, don’t just copy-and-paste when using templates, at least read the snippet you are pasting.