Visual Studio How to break on handled exceptions

Question

I would like Visual Studio to break when a handled exception happens  i e  I don t just want to see a  First chance  message  I want to debug the actual exception    e g  I want the debugger to break at the exception   try      System IO File Delete someFilename     catch  Exception         we really don t care at runtime if the file couldn t be deleted     I came across these notes for Visual Studio NET      1  In VS NET go to the Debug Menu       Exceptions         Common Language   Runtime Exceptions      System  and   select  System NullReferenceException       2  In the bottom of that dialog there   is a  When the exception is thrown     group box  select  Break into the   debugger        3  Run your scenario  When the   exception is thrown  the debugger will   stop and notify you with a dialog that   says something like                An exception of type  System NullReferenceException  has   been thrown                Break   Continue         Hit  Break   This will put you on the   line of code that s causing the   problem    But they do not apply to Visual Studio 2005  there is no Exceptions option on the Debug menu    Does anyone know where the find this options dialog in Visual Studio that the  When the exception is thrown  group box  with the option to  Break into the debugger    Update  The problem was that my Debug menu didn t have an Exceptions item  I customized the menu to manually add it

User · Answer

Check Managing Exceptions with the Debugger page, it explains how to set this up.

Essentially, here are the steps (during debugging):

On the Debug menu, click Exceptions.
In the Exceptions dialog box, select Thrown for an entire category of exceptions, for example, Common Language Runtime Exceptions.

-or-

Expand the node for a category of exceptions, for example, Common Language Runtime Exceptions, and select Thrown for a specific exception within that category.

User · Answer

With a solution open  go to the Debug - Exceptions  Ctrl D E  menu option   From there you can choose to break on Thrown or User-unhandled exceptions   EDIT  My instance is set up with the C   profile  perhaps it isn t there for other profiles

User · Answer

There is an  exceptions  window in VS2005     try Ctrl Alt E when debugging and click on the  Thrown  checkbox for the exception you want to stop on

User · Answer

A technique I use is something like the following  Define a global variable that you can use for one or multiple try catch blocks depending on what you re trying to debug and use the following structure   if  GlobalTestingBool       try            SomeErrorProneMethod            catch                         Error handling            else      SomeErrorProneMethod        I find this gives me a bit more flexibility in terms of testing because there are still some exceptions I don t want the IDE to break on

User · Answer

From Visual Studio 2015 and onward  you need to go to the  Exception Settings  dialog  Ctrl Alt E  and check off the  Common Language Runtime Exceptions   or a specific one you want i e  ArgumentNullException  to make it break on handled exceptions   Step 1  Step 2

User · Answer

The online documentation seems a little unclear  so I just performed a little test  Choosing to break on Thrown from the Exceptions dialog box causes the program execution to break on any exception  handled or unhandled  If you want to break on handled exceptions only  it seems your only recourse is to go through your code and put breakpoints on all your handled exceptions  This seems a little excessive  so it might be better to add a debug statement whenever you handle an exception  Then when you see that output  you can set a breakpoint at that line in the code

User · Answer

A technique I use is something like the following  Define a global variable that you can use for one or multiple try catch blocks depending on what you re trying to debug and use the following structure   if  GlobalTestingBool       try            SomeErrorProneMethod            catch                         Error handling            else      SomeErrorProneMethod        I find this gives me a bit more flexibility in terms of testing because there are still some exceptions I don t want the IDE to break on

User · Answer

Took me a while to find the new place for expection settings  therefore a new answer   Since Visual Studio 2015 you control which Exceptions to stop on in the Exception Settings Window  Debug- Windows- Exception Settings   The shortcut is still Ctrl-Alt-E   The simplest way to handle custom exceptions is selecting  all exceptions not in this list    Here is a screenshot from the english version     Here is a screenshot from the german version

[visual-studio] Visual Studio: How to break on handled exceptions?

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