Okay, so I finished my first game using XNA Game Studio Express, it has been only a few days since I installed it, and it has been quite easy, having experience at making games. Now, I want to show this game to my friends, so I send it to a couple of them (both of them have XNA Game Studio Express installed), and it works great.

Now I want to show it to some other friends, these who do not know what making games is about, these who do not have XNA Game Studio Express.

I ensure they follow these instructions, from the manual:

Sharing a Windows game

On Windows you need to distribute your game executable and any content required by your game. In addition you need to ensure that the user has the following redistributables installed:

* .NET Framework 2.0
* DirectX 9.0c
* XNA Framework

But still, when they try to open the game, this error (probably badly translated) pops up:
"The aplication found an error and must close"

I recommend you add some exception handling code to your game. If you are using the default project setup, add a try...catch statement in your Program.cs file around the Game object creation and invocation. The error you are seeing is caused by an unhandled exception that is crashing your game.

By catching the exception, you can do something like write out the exception to a log file, or display it in a System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox, or otherwise display a more informative error message for your user. For example, if the exception is because the user's graphics card is incompatible, then you should display a friendly dialog that explains what the problem is.

For starters, you just want to catch the exception and display what it is (call ToString() on the exception) so that you can figure out what's crashing.

--Stephen

I suggest you use something like the code below in your Program.cs file. It will catch any unhandled exception in your game's main thread and display the callstack. You will need to add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms assembly from your project in order to get this to work (right-click on the References folder in the Solution Explorer).