#908 – Handling Unhandled Exceptions

An unhandled exception is one that propagates up the call stack without being caught by an exception handler in a catch block.  By default, the .NET runtime will cause a dialog to be displayed when an unhandled exception occurs.

When an unhandled exception occurs, you can’t recover from the exception.  But you can do some final logging and then terminate the application quietly by adding a handler to the AppDomain.UnhandledException event.

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Specify handler for all unhandled exceptions
            AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += CurrentDomain_UnhandledException;

            throw new ApplicationException("Something bad happened");

            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static void CurrentDomain_UnhandledException(object sender, UnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
        {
            Exception theException = (Exception)e.ExceptionObject;

            Console.WriteLine("- In the unhandled exception handler -");
            Console.WriteLine(theException.ToString());

            // Exit to avoid unhandled exception dialog
            Environment.Exit(-1);
        }