How to cause a BSOD on Windows XP and newer versions?

Try NotMyFault!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963901

The keyboard driver(s) can be told to cause a BSOD:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters

or (for older PS/2 keyboards)

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters

And there set a REG_DWORD named CrashOnCtrlScroll to 1.

After the next reboot you can force the blue screen by Ctrl+ScrollLk+ScrollLk. The bug check code will in this case be 0xE2 (MANUALLY_INITIATED_CRASH).

If you really want a programmatic method, you need to find a hole in some driver on that machine or write and install a simplistic driver that calls either KeBugCheck or KeBugCheckEx.

Have fun ;)

Side-note: it can be very useful to deliberately cause a crash like this for driver writers or even when dealing with malware. If you configured your system to create a full memory dump, you will then have an image of the running system which can be further analyzed. Consider cases like a deadlock where a debugger does not necessarily help in all cases.