Question

Usually, Visual Studio breaks if it encounters an unhandled exception and shows an exception assistant window.

But in some occasions, Visual Studio instead just stops the program that was running and does not break or show the exception helper.

The exception options (Ctrl+Alt+E) are configured correctly: “user-unhandled” is checked on all items, “thrown” is unchecked. In the debugging options, i have enabled the exception assistant.

Because it only happens on some occassions, i tried to figure out when visual studio enters its “malfunctioning exception assistant state”.

EDIT:

It looks like the malfunctioning exception assistant ghost only shows up in winforms applications, and only after there has been some external action like calling a web service or opening a database connection.

END EDIT

It turns out the exception assistant works fine until an ADODB connection is opened:

var conn = new ADODB.Connection();
conn.Open("Provider=SQLOLEDB;Server=localhost;Database=db;UID=user;PWD=pw;", "", "", -1);
throw new InvalidOperationException();

After excecuting the conn.Open statement, the exception assistant will never kick in.

Does this sound familiar to anyone, and, more important: does anyone have a solution for the problem? As you can imagine, debugging an application becomes very hard if the application always just quits on exceptions.

Answer 1

I’m getting something similar (the same behaviour), but I think This Microsoft Help Page also describes my situation: “Unhandled exceptions in Windows Form events are not propagated up call stack”