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

June 26, 2014 Leave a comment

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.

 

Advertisement

Filed under Basics Tagged with , , ,

#1,101 – Defining a Handler for Unhandled Exceptions

June 25, 2014 2 Comments

When an exception gets thrown in a WPF application and not handled anywhere in the code, an unhandled exception occurs and the application is forced to exit.

You can handle exceptions that would otherwise be unhandled by handling theApplication.DispatcherUnhandledException event.  Below, we display a better error message and set the Handled property, to avoid shutting down the application.

This handler should be defined in the main application class (inherits from Application).

private void Application_DispatcherUnhandledException(object sender, System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
{
    string friendlyMsg = string.Format("SO sorry that something went wrong.  The error was: [{0}]", e.Exception.Message);
    string caption = "Error";
    MessageBox.Show(friendlyMsg, caption, MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Error);

    // Signal that we handled things--prevents Application from exiting
    e.Handled = true;
}

We wire up the handler by setting a value for DispatcherUnhandledException in XAML.

<Application x:Class="WpfApplication1.App"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             StartupUri="MainWindow.xaml"
             DispatcherUnhandledException="Application_DispatcherUnhandledException">
</Application>

Filed under Basics Tagged with , ,

#49 – Unhandled Exceptions

August 30, 2010 1 Comment

When an exception gets thrown in a WPF application and not handled anywhere in the code, an unhandled exception occurs and the application is forced to exit.  This will result in a window similar to the following:

When this happens, the application exits suddenly, the user has no chance to save any uncompleted work and the user gets no additional information.  In short, the application crashes.

You can handle exceptions that would otherwise be unhandled by handling the Application.DispatcherUnhandledException event.  In the example below, we display a better error message and set the Handled property, to avoid shutting down the application.

 private void Application_DispatcherUnhandledException(object sender, System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
 {
     string friendlyMsg = string.Format("SO sorry that something went wrong.  The error was: [{0}]", e.Exception.Message);
     string caption = "Error";
     MessageBox.Show(friendlyMsg, caption, MessageBoxButton.OK, MessageBoxImage.Error);

     // Signal that we handled things--prevents Application from exiting
     e.Handled = true;
 }

This results in a better error:

Filed under Basics Tagged with ,