Basically, you cannot catch all exceptions when using the default CLR hosting process. Period. This is because the AppDomain.UnhandledException
event is a notification only, you cannot handle the exception (which means that you cannot prevent the application from being terminated after processing the notification).
However, you can catch and handle all exceptions in the UI thread of a WinForms application by using its Application.ThreadException
handler (and control the behavior via UnhandledExceptionMode
). Other threads which throw an exception will not be caught by this handler.
In general, it's not a good idea to try and handle all exceptions. You can, however, use the
AppDomain.UnhandledException
to log the error and/or perform important cleanup tasks (e.g. shutting down a file-based databaseor whatever).