How can I make something that catches all 'unhandled' exceptions in a WinForms application?

Question

Up until now, I just put a try/catch block around the Application.Run in the Program.cs entry point to the program. This catches all exceptions well enough in Debug mode, but when I run the program without the debug mode, exceptions don't get handled anymore. I get the unhandled exception box.

I don't want this to happen. I want all exceptions to be caught when running in non-debug mode. The program has multiple threads and preferably all exceptions from them get caught by the same handler; I want to log exceptions in the DB. Does anyone have any advice in how to do this?

Answer 1

Take a look at the example from the ThreadException documentation:

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
   // Add the event handler for handling UI thread exceptions to the event.
    Application.ThreadException += new     
  ThreadExceptionEventHandler(ErrorHandlerForm.Form1_UIThreadException);

  // Set the unhandled exception mode to force all Windows Forms errors
  // to go through our handler.
  Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode(UnhandledExceptionMode.CatchException);

  // Add the event handler for handling non-UI thread exceptions to the event. 
  AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += new       
  UnhandledExceptionEventHandler(CurrentDomain_UnhandledException);
}

You might also want to not catch exceptions when debugging, as this makes it easier to debug. It is somewhat of a hack, but for that you can wrap the above code around with

 if (!AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName.EndsWith("vshost.exe")) { ... }

To prevent catching the exceptions when debugging.

EDIT: An alternate way to check for your application running inside a debugger that feels cleaner than checking a filename.

(see comments by moltenform, Kiquenet and Doug)

if(!System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached) { ... }

This avoids the problem of using a different debugger than vshost.exe.