#1,102 – Shutting Application Down after Handling Unhandled Exception

You can handle the DispatcherUnhandledException event in your main application object to intercept any unhandled exceptions that would otherwise crash your application.

You’ll typically handle DispatcherUnhandledException in order to handle unforeseen exceptions in a more friendly manner. After doing something with the exception information, e.g. logging it or notifying the user, you typically have the following options.

• Ignore cause of exception and continue execution
  • Set e.Handled to true
• Allow unhandled exception to crash application as it normally would
  • Leave e.Handled set to false
• Shut down gracefully  (typical behavior)
  • Set e.Handled to true
  • Invoke Application.Shutdown()

You’ll most often select the third option.  If you’re logging or reporting exception information in a friendly manner, you will want to mark Handled as true.  And you do typically want to shut down and application after something unexpected happens.  Often you don’t know what state your application is in, so it’s desirable to just exit.