Question

I’m debugging a Windows Forms client that calls a WCF service in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

I want to test my exception handling code, so I intentionally mis-configured my endpoint in app.config. The expected ConfigurationErrorsException is thrown. However, Visual Studio 2010 stops on the offending line of code even though I have set it not to break for either Thrown or User-unhandled exceptions.

If I try to start without debugging, I get a generic “My Program has stopped working” dialog with the option to debug. If I elect to debug, it brings me back to the same line where the exception was caught.

The line that I can’t get past is:

MySvc.MyServiceClient svc = new MySvc.MyServiceClient();

If I instead simulate an error by doing division by zero somewhere in the client (or just plain throw an Exception), the debugger behaves as I would expect and enters my error handling code.

My takeaway is that I cannot actually handle the exception when app.config is misconfigured. Am I missing something here?

UPDATE:

I am handling the Application ThreadException event to try and catch this:

Application.ThreadException += new System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException);

Answer 1

Ctrl+D, E should allow you to configure VS exception handling options. Uncheck “Common Language Runtime Exceptions” and then your code will handle all exceptions.

EDIT (by poster)

The comment provides the correct solution.

Perhaps the exception is happening on
another thread somehow via an
asynchronous call in the WCF proxy?
Try hooking the
Application.UnhandledException and
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException
events and see if they catch your
culprit.