Question

So our application has a nice, central exception handler, wherein the details of exceptions are logged, generic windows are displayed to the users, and shutdown happens in a nice graceful way. However, we now have a 3rd party component that, from time to time, (and potentially for perfectly valid reasons) calls Environment.FailFast. This blows our app out of the water, and looks quite terrible to our users. Is there some way to handle Environment.FailFast in an elegant way?

Answer 1

I can’t see a way, according to the various entries in MSDN this is a hard termination of the process. Any code you would create to handle this would reside in the process. It also doesn’t run finally blocks or any pending finalizers, so I’m guessing wouldn’t provide any events or hooks in order to allow custom code to run. In a way this makes sense, otherwise it might not fail “fast” and it argues to only use in cases of extreme process corruption.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd289241

I see two three options:

1. Send a request to the vendor to change the code and remove this call.
2. Find a new vendor.
3. As suggested by @RB. farm the use of this DLL into a new process so the core application process remains safe. I did this once, mega headache but “it worked”. I would only advise this if you cannot utilise suggestions 1 or 2!

Quote from MSDN:

This method terminates a process without running any active
try/finally blocks or finalizers.

The FailFast method writes the message string to the Windows
Application event log, creates a dump of your application, and then
terminates the current process. The message string is also included in
error reporting to Microsoft.

Use the FailFast method instead of the Exit method to terminate your
application if the state of your application is damaged beyond repair,
and executing your application’s try/finally blocks and finalizers
will corrupt program resources.