Question

The code is fairly simple — the issue is that there is an invalid character in the groupPath string (a ‘/’ to be exact).

What I’m trying to do (at least as a stop gap) is skip over DirectoryEntries that I can’t get the cn for — regardless of why.

However when I run this code the catch block doesn’t run and I get instead:
The server is not operational. and an unhandled System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException.

Why would the catch block not catch this exception.

try
{
    using (DirectoryEntry groupBinding = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + groupPath))
    {
        using (DirectorySearcher groupSearch = new DirectorySearcher(groupBinding))
        {

            using (DirectoryEntry groupEntry = groupSearch.FindOne().GetDirectoryEntry())
            {
                results.Add(string.Format("{0}", groupEntry.Properties["cn"].Value.ToString()));
            }
        }
    }
}
catch
{
    Logger.Error("User has bad roles");
}

Additional observations:
The code is actually in a custom RoleProvider, and the curious thing is that if I reference, this provider in a simple winforms app, and call this same method with the same inputs the catch block does exactly what it’s suppose to do. I think this suggests that the proposed answer concerning .NET exceptions versus COM exceptions is not accurate.
Although I am at a loss to understand why this code would not catch when executed from the WebDev server

Answer 1

When you don’t specify what to catch, it defaults to .NET exceptions. Your exception is in COM where .NET isn’t set to catch the exception. The best way to deal with this is to catch the COM exception, which should look something like this:

    try
    {

    }
    catch (System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException COMex)
    {

    }
    catch (System.Exception ex)
    {

    }