Question

I want to know whether unhandled exception will make WCF service crash. I have written the following program which shows unhandled exception in a thread started by WCF service will make the whole WCF service crash.

My question is, I want to confirm whether unhandled exception in threads (started by WCF service) will make WCF crash? My confusion is I think WCF should be stable service which should not crash because of unhandled exception.

I am using VSTS 2008 + C# + .Net 3.5 to develop a self-hosted Windows Service based WCF service.

Here are the related parts of code,

namespace Foo
{
    // NOTE: If you change the interface name "IService1" here, you must also update the reference to "IService1" in Web.config.
    [ServiceContract]
    public interface IFoo
    {
        [OperationContract]
        string Submit(string request);
    }
}

namespace Foo
{
    // NOTE: If you change the class name "Service1" here, you must also update the reference to "Service1" in Web.config and in the associated .svc file.
    public class FooImpl : IFoo
    {
        public string Submit(string request)
        {
            return String.Empty;
        }
    }
}

namespace Foo
{
    public partial class Service1 : ServiceBase
    {
        public Service1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        ServiceHost host = new ServiceHost(typeof(FooImpl));

        protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
        {
            host.Open();
            // start a thread which will throw unhandled exception
            Thread t = new Thread(Workerjob);
            t.Start();
        }

        protected override void OnStop()
        {
            host.Close();
        }

        public static void Workerjob()
        {
            Thread.Sleep(5000);
            throw new Exception("unhandled");
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Yes, an unhandled exception in a thread will take the process down.

This process will crash:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Thread t = new Thread(() =>
    {
        throw new NullReferenceException();
    });
    t.Start();
    Console.ReadKey();
}

This one will not:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Thread t = new Thread(() =>
    {
        try
        {
            throw new NullReferenceException();
        }
        catch (Exception exception)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(exception.ToString());
        }
    });
    t.Start();
    Console.ReadKey();
}