Question

I’m going through a book of general c# development, and I’ve come to the thread abort section.

The book says something along the lines that when you call Thread.Abort() on another thread, that thread will throw a ThreadAbortException, and even if you tried to supress it it would automatically rethrow it, unless you did some bs that’s generally frowned upon. Here’s the simple example offered.

using System;
using System.Threading;

public class EntryPoint
{
    private static void ThreadFunc()
    {
        ulong counter = 0;
        while (true)
        {
            try
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}", counter++);
            }
            catch (ThreadAbortException)
            {
                // Attempt to swallow the exception and continue.
                Console.WriteLine("Abort!");
             }
        }
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        try
        {
            Thread newThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(EntryPoint.ThreadFunc));
            newThread.Start();
            Thread.Sleep(2000);

            // Abort the thread.
            newThread.Abort();

           // Wait for thread to finish.
           newThread.Join();
        }
       catch (Exception e)
       {
           Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
       }
    }
}

The book says:

When your thread finishes processing the abort exception, the runtime implicitly rethrows it at the end of your exception handler. It’s the same as if you had rethrown the exception yourself. Therefore, any outer exception handlers or finally blocks will still execute normally. In the example, the call to Join won’t be waiting forever as initially expected.

So i wrapped a try catch around the Thread.Abort() call and set a break point, expecting it to hit this, considering the text says “any outer exception handlers or finally blocks will still execute normally”. BUT IT DOES NOT. I’m racking my brain to figure out why.

Anyone have any thoughts on why this isn’t the case? Is the book wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The exception is thrown on the thread that is aborted. Once thrown an exception travels up the call stack of that thread, but it does not jump over to another thread, nor to the caller of Thread.Abort.

The claim was:

Therefore, any outer exception handlers or finally blocks will still execute normally.

A better test of this claim is the following code:

private static void ThreadFunc()
{
    ulong counter = 0;
    while (true)
    {
        try
        {
            try
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}", counter++);
            }
            catch (ThreadAbortException)
            {
                // Attempt to swallow the exception and continue.
                Console.WriteLine("Abort!");
            }
        }
        catch (ThreadAbortException)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Do we get here?");
        }
    }
}

If ThreadAbortException were a normal type of exception we would not expect to hit the line "Do we get here?", but we do.