Calling console application from Azure DevOps Release Pipeline
All the process launched in the release will be finished when the release is over. If you don't want the process to be closed, try setting variable Process.clean= false.
But when you create a new release next time, you need to stop process before starting it.
When I run the Release pipeline it reports back in DevOps that it runs successfully and I can only detect that the console app has run and immediately crashed is from the windows event log on the agent server.
It seems that that release pipeline has finished and returned with success status at that time.
So I think your crash could result from the default behavior of VSTS, it will close all the process launched during the build/release after it is finished. Just like what jessehouwing describes here.
Running the agent interactively solved the problem. I created a second agent on the server and when configuring I left off the "--runasservice" and just ran the agent by hand ".\run"