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Exception control when release an application?

Possibly an obvious question to some but couldn't find a duplicate.
I'm packaging the final version of a Windows Forms solution I've been working on and am getting it ready for online distribution. What are the best practices when doing so? We've already had some trouble with packaging the installation file and have run into hurdles to test the program on different PCs, both 32 and 64-bit included.
More specifically, should "throw;" commands be commented out or left in the final release? Would this expose any of the inner workings of the solution itself?

Released application should not crash when exception occurs. You will want to inform the user, something went wrong and log your exception, but you do not want to crash! Informing user should be done in a friendly manner and not just by putting exception.ToString() into the message box.
It is a good practice to add Application.ThreadException or AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException handlers to handle all exceptions in your Application. How exactly to do that, is answered in the following thread: Catch Application Exceptions in a Windows Forms Application
However, make sure that your application survives in a usable state, i.e. handle exceptions in a proper way for your application.
I usually add a preprocessor directive for handling exceptions on the application level, since I want them to trow while debugging. For example:
#if !DEBUG
Application.ThreadException += new ThreadExceptionEventHandler(MyHandler);
#endif
It should also be mentioned, that if you have code pieces where you anticipate that Exception might occur, such as network communication error, you should handle those pieces explicitly. What I am saying is, we should not completely forget about exception handling, just because we configured an unhandled exception handler on the application level.

Keep all of your exception handling intact.
Add an event to the starting form in the application, attaching to the Application.UnhandledException event. This will fire if an exception propogates up the stack.
This is the point to inform the user that the application has crashed. Log the error here and then abort gracefully.
Your point about revealing internals, thats up to you to decide. You can obfuscate the source code if you wish, but if you are releasing in Release build mode, and you are not providing the .PDB, then this is the first step.
Ultimately, the DLL / EXE can be decompiled anyway, so its up to you. Debug mode will reveal a lot more than Release mode, but not much more.

Ideally, you should be catching anything that's thrown higher with throw;. Carefully check your code and try to ensure that thrown exceptions are dealt with appropriately. Unhandled exceptions are logged - you can see this information in the Windows Event Viewer. Depending on what details you put in them, unhandled exceptions could give clues as to the inner workings of your application. However, I would suggest that unhandled exceptions are a poor source of information, and that anyone who wanted to know how your application worked could simply disassemble it, unless you've obfuscated it.
Some exceptions cannot be caught by surrounding code with try/catch blocks, so your application should also implement an unhandled exception handler. This gives you the opportunity to show the user an error message and do something with the exception - log it, send it to support, discard it, etc.

Your application has stopped working, even when hooking to UnhandledExceptionHandler

I have added a global error handler at the AppDomain level to my C# application, by hooking into the UnhandledExceptionHandler event.
My problem is, that even though i am handling this exception, i still get the popup saying "App has stopped working".
Is this normal behaviour? Can it be turned off? or maybe it is good practice to actually have this message displayed?

Is this normal behaviour?
Yes. Think about it, where should your code be resumed? In what state?
Can it be turned off?
Only by handling exceptions a the appropriate point in your program, ie in the toplevel code. The UnhandledExceptionHandler is not a replacement but a diagnosis-tool for incomplete handling.
or maybe it is good practice to actually have this message displayed?
Yes. You should log exceptions that arrive there but you've already lost control.

I don't think is possible to recover the existing instance of an app when you get at that point. MSDN has no information about it and is suggested " If sufficient information about the state of the application is available, other actions may be undertaken — such as saving program data for later recovery." (link)
It kind of makes sense to not be able to recover. If you catch an exception in the Unhandled ExceptionHandler it means that your application was not able to deal with it so is your last chance to log what happened (for later investigations) or save the user's data. It sounds like an architecture problem if the "unhandled" exception handler must "handle" exceptions and recover the app.
Why not recover by creating a new instance of the app? (or by using the Restart and Recovery feature)

Long running App, how handle Errors?

i have to implement a Info Terminal. I choose dot.net and the terminal is only a touchpad.
So this System running 7 days 24 hours.
So i call a Webservice, display Data, show Website stuff. Many things can going wrong.
Have you some recommendations for this scenario?
Every function in an try catch? AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException event?
Thanks Andreas

Basically, you should handle any error as soon as it is possible - so if you're calling webservice wrap all the calls in a try/catch block and handle the error there - you can, for example, log the exact error, aggregate many webservice-related exception in more generic, DataSourceFaultException (name is only for example), which will be then received by UI and UI will be able to easily determine, that it can't display requested info because communication failed, and choose to retry, notify user or do anything else.
However - with long running application there are many more errors you'll have to deal with. Many of them are not easy to predict, as they're not necessarily related to any specific call - you can run out of memory, a recursion might cause stack overflow, a system timer can reach it's max value and start from the beginning etc.
You shouldn't handle those errors in every method, as it will only hurt code readibility and will be error prone. Those errors are best handled by UnhandledException event. However, you must remember, that when the exception reaches UnhandledException event, you cannot assume anything about state of your application - the error might have corrupted some (or even all) of internal state. So when such condition occurs, it's best to try to create an error log and gracefuly restart the application (not necessarily whole application - maybe it will be possible to reinitialize application's state - if so, that's a valid option too. However, you must be aware that you won't be able to recover from some errors and handle such situation anyway).

It depends.
If you can handle appropriately an exception within a function - handle it. If not - create a global exception handler to inform user or log it.

Why are try-catch in main() bad?

Could someone explain to me why it is considered inapropriate to have a try-catch in the main() method to catch any unhandled exceptions?
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
try
{
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
catch (Exception e)
{
MessageBox.Show("General error: " + e.ToString());
}
}
I have the understanding that this is bad practice, but not sure why.

I don't think its necessarily bad practice. There are a few caveats however...
I believe the point of whoever called this "bad practice" was to reinforce the idea that you should be catching exceptions closest to where they occur (i.e. as high up the call stack as possible/appropiate). A blanket exception handler isn't typically a good idea because its drastically reduces the control flow available to you. Coarse-grained exception handling is quite importantly not a reasonable solution to program stability. Unfortunately, many beginner developers think that it is, and take such approaches as this blanket try-catch statement.
Saying this, if you have utilised exception handling properly (in a fine-grained and task-specific manner) in the rest of your program, and handled the errors accordingly there (rather than juist displaying a generic error box), then a general try-catch for all exceptions in the Main method is probably a useful thing to have. One point to note here is that if you're reproducably getting bugs caught in this Main try-catch, then you either have a bug or something is wrong with your localised exception handling.
The primary usage of this try-catch with Main would be purely to prevent your program from crashing in very unusual circumstances, and should do hardly any more than display a (vaguely) user-friendly "fatal error" message to the user, as well as possibly logging the error somewhere and/or submitting a bug report. So to conclude: this method does have its uses, but it must be done with great care, and not for the wrong reasons.

Well, this method will only capture exceptions thrown in your main thread. If you use both the Application.ThreadException and the AppDomian.UnhandledException events instead then you'll be able to catch and log all exceptions.

I don't see how that's bad practice at all.
Letting your program crash with an unhandled exception error isn't going to instill any confidence in your end users.
Maybe someone else could provide a counter view.
Update:
Obviously you'll need to do something useful with the exception.
log it
show the user a dialog stating WHY the application is exiting (in plain text, not a stacktrace)
something else that makes sense in the context of your application.

I don't think that's a bad practice in and of itself. I think the bad practice would be if that was the ONLY try/catch block you had in your application.

In antiquity, placing a try/catch in C++ caused a fairly heavy performance penalty, and placing one around main would mean storing extra stack info for everything, which again was bad for performance.
Now computers are faster, programmers less addicted to performance, and runtimes are better built, so it's not really bad anymore (but still you might pay a little more for it, haven't benchmarked it's effect in years). So it's old folklore like iterating against the grain (compilers actually fix the iteration anyways for you nowadays). In C# it's perfectly fine, but it'd look iffy to someone from 10 years ago.

Any exception which gets to Main() is likely fatal.
If it was something easy, it should have been handled higher up. If it was something beyond your control, like OutOfMemoryException, then the program should crash.
Windows application which crash have a standard way of doing so, they trigger the Windows Error Reporting dialog. (You've likely seen it before). You can sign up to recieve crash data when this happens.

I'm not sure I think its a bad practice. What you want to do is make sure that the exception and the current state of the program when it crashes ends up in the hands of a developer, preferably logged with date, time and the user who was working with it. Basically - you want to make sure that your team has all the information they need to debug the problem, regardless of whether or not the user goes to them about the crash. Remember that many users will not, in fact, contact support if they get a crash.
The bad practice here would be catching the exception, showing a simple "Error" dialog box, and closing the application. In that case, the state of that exception is lost forever.

From a debugging standpoint, this can make life more difficult, as it makes every exception a user handled exception. This changes the debugger's behavior, unless you break on unhandled exceptions, which potentially has other issues.
That being said, I think this is a good practice at release time. In addition, I recommend listening on the AppDomain.UnhandledException and the Application.ThreadException events, as well. This will let you trap even more exceptions (such as some system exceptions that will not be caught in your "global" handler above).
That allows you to log the errors and provide the user with a good, clean message.

Change it to this and it's fine
catch(Exception ex)
{
YourLoggingSystem.LogException(ex);
}
Of course, this line should NEVER be hit as you'll have other exception handlers throughout your code catching things with much more context.

Top-level exception handling is pretty essential, but I'd recommend using:
Application.ThreadException += new ThreadExceptionEventHandler(YourExceptionHandlingMethod);
However, this will only catch exceptions on the GUI thread (much like your try..catch block) - you should use similar code for each new thread you start to handle any unexpected exceptions from them.
More about it here.

You've got the catch-all exception there which will trap everything. So if you've got any unhandled exceptions in you code you'll never see them.
On the positive side, your application will never crash!
If this is required behaviour then you'll need to have sufficient logging and reporting to let both the user and you, as developer, know what's happened and recover or exit as gracefully as possible.

I'm not saying it's bad practice, the only thing I would do different though is use the built in event for that:
Application.ThreadException += new System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException);
static void Application_ThreadException(object sender, System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(e.Exception.Message); //or do whatever...
}

I think this is discouraged because exceptions are caught only once and there may be multiple things, like background threads, that need to know if a process throws.
Is this a WinForms app? Forms.Application.Run raises events whenever a thread throws an unhandled exception. The MSDN docs try to explain this, but the handler they show doesn't work! Read the updated example from the WinForms UE site.

If your program tries to keep running despite a catch-all catching who-knows-what kind of violation of assumptions down below, it's in a danger zone for things like remote exploitation of security flaws (buffer overflows, heap corruption). Putting it in a loop and continuing to run is a big red flag for software quality.
Getting out as quickly as possible is the best, e.g. exit(1). Log and exit is good though slightly riskier.
Don't believe me? The Mitre Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) agrees. Closely related is its advice against catching NULL pointer dereferencing in this way.

What is the best way to collect crash data?

So I am sold on the concept of attempting to collect data automatically from a program - i.e., popping up a dialog box that asks the user to send the report when something goes wrong.
I'm working in MS Visual Studio C#.
From an implementation point of view, does it make sense to put a try/catch loop in my main program.cs file, around where the application is run? Like this:
try
{
Application.Run(new myMainForm());
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//the code to build the report I want to send and to
//pop up the Problem Report form and ask the user to send
}
or does it make sense to put try/catch loops throughout pieces of the code to catch more specific exception types? (I'm thinking not because this is a new application, and putting in more specific exception catches means I have an idea of what's going to go wrong... I don't, which is why the above seems to make sense to me.)
-Adeena

I think you are right, you would not know what's going to go wrong, which is the point.
However, you might as well consider adding a handler to the ThreadException event instead.
The code above will work but there will be scenarios where multi threading might be an issue with such code, since not all code inside your windows forms program will be running in the main Application.Run loop thread.
Here's a sample code from the linked article:
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
System.Windows.Forms.Application.ThreadException += new ThreadExceptionEventHandler(ReportError);
System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run(new MainForm());
}
private static void ReportError(object sender, ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)
{
using (ReportErrorDialog errorDlg = new ReportErrorDialog(e.Exception))
{
errorDlg.ShowDialog();
}
}
More documentation on MSDN.
On a minor point, using the ThreadException event also allow your main message loop to continue running in case the exception isn't fatal (i.e. fault-tolerance scenarios) whilst the try/catch approach may requires that you restart the main message loop which could cause side effects.

From an implementation point of view, does it make sense to put a try/catch loop in my main program.cs file, around where the application is run?
Sure and always.
You should use Try/Catch-Blocks wherever you do something critical, that might raise an exception.
Therefore you can not really stick to a pattern for that, because you should now, when what exception will be raised. Otherwise these are unhandled exceptions, which let your program crash.
But there are many exceptions, that need not to stop the application entirely, exceptions, that just can be swallowed over, as they are expected and do not critically need the application to stop. Example for that are UnauthorizedAccessExceptions when moving or accessing data with your programm.
You should try to keep you Try/Catch-Blocks as small as needed, as well as to use not too much of them, because of performance.
Some out there use Try/Catch for steering the program's execution. That should entirely be avoided wherever possible, cause raising an Exception is performance killer number 1.

Wrapping a try catch around the whole application will mean the application will exit upon error.
While using a try and catch around each method is hard to maintain.
Best practice is to use specific try catches around units of code that will throw specific exception types such as FormatException and leave the general exception handling to the application level event handlers.
try
{
//Code that could error here
}
catch (FormatException ex)
{
//Code to tell user of their error
//all other errors will be handled
//by the global error handler
}
Experience will tell you the type of things that could go wrong. Over time you will notice your app often throwing say IO exceptions around file access so you may then later catch these and give the user more information.
The global handlers for errors will catch everything else. You use these by hooking up event handlers to the two events System.Windows.Forms.Application.ThreadException (see MSDN) and AppDomain.UnhandledException (see MSDN)
Be aware that Out of Memory exceptions and StackOverflowException may not be caught by any error catching.

If you do want to automatically get stack traces, Microsoft do allow you to submit them via the Error Reporting Services. All you need to do is sign up for a Digital Certificate from VeriSign and register it (for free) with Microsoft.
Microsoft then gives you a login for you to download the mini-dumps from a website, which are submitted when a user clicks "Send Error Report".
Although people can hit "Don't Send", at least it is a Microsoft dialog box and possibly not one that you have to code yourself. It would be running 24/7, you wouldn't have to worry about uptime of your web server AND you can submit workaround details for users AND you can deliver updates via Windows Update.
Information about this service is located in this "Windows Error Reporting: Getting Started" article.

The best approach is to sing up for
AppDomain.UnhandledException and Application.ThreadException In your application's main function. This will allow you to record any unhandled exceptions in your application. Wraping run in a try catch block does not catch every thing.

if you just want to capture crashes, then ignore all errors and let DrWatson generate a minidump for you. Then you can look at that ina debugger (windbg is preferred for minidumps) and it'll show you the line your code went wrong on, and also all the parameters, stack trace, and registers. You can set Drwatson to generate a full dump where you'll get an entire memory core dump to investigate.
I wouldn't recommend putting a try/catch around the entire app unless you want your app to never "crash" in front of the user - it'll always be handled, and probably ignored as there's nothing you can do with the exception at that point.
Sending the minidump to you is another matter though, here's an article, you'll have to do some work to get it sent via email/http/ftp/etc.