Gotta catch 'em all: Last-chance exception handling in .NET with WinForms

Recently, I went through the exercise of hooking up a crash-reporting component to a large .NET application using Windows Forms.  The goal, of course, is to catch all unhandled exceptions so they can be reported to the developer.

Throughout this post I'll be referring to this Program.cs. The code we incrementally un-commented for each of the examples. I'll also link to compiled example executables. If you don't trust my binaries, you can compile them yourself.

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0.  No exception handling

First we see an application that throws exceptions in the UI thread and a background thread, with no handling. Try out 0_Nothing.exe.
With no exception handling, background thread exceptions crash hard. UI thread exceptions are handled by the built-in .NET WinForms handler:

This has a Continue option which allows the user to ignore the exception and go on. This method is absolutely unacceptable. No exceptions should ever be allowed to be ignored, as the program is in an indeterminate state.

1.  try / catch

The naive approach would be to set up a try/catch block in Main() around the Application.Run() call. See 1_TryCatch.exe.

try {
   Application.Run(new Form1());
}
catch (Exception ex) {
   // ...
}

We see here that there is no difference between this and the version with no try/catch. This is because the UI thread exceptions are still being handled inside of Application.Run() by the default handler. The try/catch is never used, and background thread exceptions are unaffected.

2.  Application.ThreadException

Next, we utilize WinForms' Application.ThreadException event to handle UI thread exceptions. See 2_Application_ThreadException.exe.

Application.ThreadException += (sender, args) =>
   HandleException("Application.ThreadException", args.Exception);

Here, we see that instead of the unacceptable WinForms handler, our handler was called (for UI thread exceptions). However, as MSDN points out (emphasis mine):

This event allows your Windows Forms application to handle otherwise unhandled exceptions that occur in Windows Forms threads.
...
To catch exceptions that occur in threads not created and owned by Windows Forms, use the UnhandledException event handler.

So background thread exceptions still crash hard in this example.

3.  AppDomain.UnhandledException

Now we follow the documentation and hook up the AppDomain.UnhandledException handler. See 3_AppDomain_UnhandledException_NoUhandledMode.exe.

AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += (sender, args) =>
   HandleException("AppDomain.UnhandledException", (Exception)args.ExceptionObject);

Now finally, we are able to catch exceptions on background threads with this handler. UI thread exceptions, however, are still handled by our Application.ThreadException handler.

4.  Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode

As mentioned in the MSDN documentation, a call to Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode and passing UnhandledExceptionMode.ThrowException tells Winforms to not use the Application.ThreadException handler. Instead, it lets exceptions bubble out of Application.Run. See this in 4_Everything.exe.

Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode(UnhandledExceptionMode.ThrowException);

The result is that the try/catch around Application.Run actually works now: UI thread exceptions are now caught by that handler.

5.  No more try / catch

Finally, removing the try/catch around Application.Run allows for all unhandled exceptions to be handled via AppDomain.UnhandledException. See 5_Final.exe. This is how we ended up handling everything in our application; we found it ideal to have one route for all^[1] unhandled exceptions.

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Summary

It is important to note that all exceptions are handled on the thread that they occurred on. If you're in the same boat I was in, you're stuck with a third-party crash handler component that had to be run on the UI thread. Because of this, I marshal the calls to the UI thread with a call to Control.Invoke(), as usual for cross-thread UI stuff.

[1] - In fact it gets even more complicated. There are certain scenarios where exceptions that need to cross Kernel or COM boundaries can be swallowed. For example, the Form.OnLoad method is actually a user-mode kernel callback. These are notorious for swallowing exceptions. In cases where we are sufficiently suspect of exceptions, we set up a try/catch and manually hand off the exception to the common handler.

The full source code for my example binaries can be downloaded here.