Question

I was trying to “measure” stack depth. Why the following program doesn’t print anything?

class Program
{
    private static int Depth = 0;

    static void A(object o) 
    {
        Depth++;
        A(o);
    }

    static void B(object o, bool e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(Depth);
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        RuntimeHelpers.ExecuteCodeWithGuaranteedCleanup(A, B, null);
    }
}

Some answers simply include a quote from MSDN, like “Starting with the .NET Framework version 2.0, a StackOverflowException object cannot be caught by a try-catch block and the corresponding process is terminated by default.” Believe me, sometimes (when there is enough stack space) it can be cought, the following prints some number just fine:

class Program
{
    private static int depth = 0;

    static void A(object o)
    {
        depth++;
        if (Environment.StackTrace.Length > 8000)
            throw new StackOverflowException("Catch me if you can.");
        A(o);
    }

    static void B(object o, bool e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(depth);
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        RuntimeHelpers.ExecuteCodeWithGuaranteedCleanup(A, B, null);
    }
}

Answer 1

If you want to catch it, load it into another process (that calls-back to yours via remoting) and lets the miscreant code execute there. The other process may terminate, and you could get a neat SOE popping out the end of the pipe on your side – without the adverse effects of the rather inconvenient exception.

Note that a separate AppDomain in the same process won’t cut it.

If you want to get the stack trace from an exception the following code will do you great justice:

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                Recurse(0);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                StackTrace st = new StackTrace(ex);
                // Go wild.
                Console.WriteLine(st.FrameCount);
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static void Recurse(int counter)
        {
            if (counter >= 100)
                throw new Exception();
            Recurse(++counter);
        }
    }