Conditions when finally does not execute in a .net try..finally block

Question

Basically I've heard that certain conditions will cause .net to blow past the finally block. Does anyone know what those conditions are?

Answer 1

Unless the CLR blows up and goes down with an ExecutingEngineException (I've seen a few in the .net 1.1 days with just the right amount of COM Interop :) .. I think finally should always execute.

Answer 2

Two possibilities:

• StackOverflowException
• ExecutingEngineException

The finally block will not be executed when there's a StackOverflowException since there's no room on the stack to even execute any more code. It will also not be called when there's an ExecutingEngineException, which is very rare.

Answer 3

You can get a situation where the code in the try block causes a SecurityException to be thrown before the try block entered (instead the exception is thrown when the containing method is called (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fk6t46tz(VS.71).aspx)), in this situation you never even enter the try block so the code in the finally block is never called.

Other possibilities include StackOverflowException, and ExecutingEngineException.

Answer 4

There is also Application.Exit method.