Question

I have this consumer targeted application that has built in error reporting.
Sometimes I get error reports for exceptions like the remote name could not be resolved
on host names like google.com for example.
Which obviously is not a problem in my application, but rather on the users end.

How can I, in my application, categorize certain Exceptions and instead of offer sending an error report, show a dialog suggesting the user to check certain things on his/her end.
Also taking into account the fact that users have localized .NET framework installations. (Error messages in their language)

EDIT: It’s really not a question about separating SQLException from WebException, it’s more how I can determine a WebException of type remote name could not be resolved from WebException The operation has timed-out for example.

Answer 1

You want to use try/catch statement with multiple catch blocks:

try { ... connect... }
catch(SocketException ex) { 
  switch(ex.ErrorCode)
  {
    case 123: ....
    default: ....
  }
}
catch(WebException ex) { 
  if(ex.InnerException is SocketException)
  {
    switch(((SocketException)ex.InnerException).ErrorCode)
    {
      case 123: ....
      default: ....
    }
  }
  switch(ex.Status)
  {
    case 500: ....
    default: ....
  }
}
....
catch(Exception ex) { .... something unforeseen, send error report .... }

Basically, each one of those exception should contain additional information in properties that you can check without relying on string comparisons.