VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Exception Stack Trace

Omer van Kloeten's .NET Zen — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 23:23:00 GMT

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Corrado Cavalli — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 20:48:00 GMT

VB does not seems to have $Exception...

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Hans Jergen Ohff — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 20:53:00 GMT

VB doesn't seem to have very much but skipping right along....*quickly shuffles crowd onwards*...

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Michael Teper — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 00:03:00 GMT

Sweet!!!!

Lost

Wallace B. McClure — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 04:35:00 GMT

$exception

jaybaz_MS's WebLog — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:29:00 GMT

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Dennis — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:36:00 GMT

This is cool but why aren't you catching the exception in the first place?

Personally, I just wrap everything in a try, call a central exception handler, and while developing put a breakpoint in the handler...

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

im — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 07:55:00 GMT

Quick! Everyone copy Dennis - his is the only way. (apparently)

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Dennis — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 23:49:00 GMT

Oh, gimme a break, im...didn't say it was the only way, just another way, which I happen to use...my question wasn't rhetorical.

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Eric — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:36:00 GMT

"This is cool but why aren't you catching the exception in the first place?"

Because you want to allow the exception to bubble up the call stack? Often the immediate (or a not-so-immediate) caller of a method will have much better information about the context of an exception than the actual site where the exception was thrown. In those cases there's no point to adding a try...catch block since the catch would just be rethrowing the exception without adding any real value. You might as well bubble the exception up and see if the next higher caller can add any information.

Obviously at the top level you probably want to catch the exception whether you can add any value or not, so that you can log it and display a pretty message to the user (if there is a UI).

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Mike — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:58:00 GMT

"This is cool but why aren't you catching the exception in the first place?"

You shouldn't catch an exceptoin unless there's something you can do to recover from it or you're the last stop before the user get's it and need to log it and replace with a user friendly message.

"call a central exception handler"

This statement kind of addresses that but if you're not the last stop before the user gets it, you could be hijacking control and not allowing a component that called you to recover.

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Keith Hill — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:33:00 GMT

I like this feature, having used it a good bit (after seeing it in the debug tip/tricks session at PDC). However, for "discoverability" why not add a "View Last Exception" to the Debug menu with an embedded property grid for viewing the properties of the exception?

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Scott Colestock — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 15:23:00 GMT

Hmmm - I often go to the Debug-Exceptions dialog and just turn on "break into the debugger" for all CLR exceptions. Yes, you occasionally get first chance exceptions that you can just let go by, but it works quite well generally speaking.

Shaykat's Visual Studio 2003 Tips

Code/Tea/Etc... — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 12:00:00 GMT

Shaykat's Visual Studio 2003 Tips

Code/Tea/Etc... — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 12:03:00 GMT

re: VS 2003 Tip #3: View exception information with $exception

Richard Murillo — Sun, 21 Mar 2004 06:38:00 GMT

I've flip-flopped back and forth between VB and C based languaged, and finally ended up in the lap of vb.net after writing ASP pages for quite some time in vbscript, and am just wondering why C# has so many more useful features than VB. We know that they all compile down to MSIL, but still, there are many more useful things in C# than in VB.Net and I can't help but feel left out. I love VB, and don't want to give it up. Just a thought.

Shaykat's Visual Studio 2003 Tips

Code/Tea/Etc. — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:17:00 GMT

View exception information while debugging in Visual Studio

Fabrice's weblog — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:46:00 GMT