Visual Studio debugging - ignore exception in one place while breaking at it elsewhere?

Question

I have some code which generates a large quantity of ArgumentExceptions on one particular line (which is in a different developer's code, so I can't just change it), which are then caught and handled appropriately.

I'm trying to debug ArgumentExceptions which are happening in a different section of code (and are then caught and handled, so I can't just look at unhandled exceptions).

Is there some way to ignore the ArgumentExceptions originating from that particular other line of code, while still breaking on ArgumentExceptions which are thrown elsewhere?

Answer 1

If you know how you are calling it, I would set the break point in your code and then step into (F11) from there. You could also smack the programmer until they fix their code, which would have the effect of making you feel better (unless you are a pacifist) and maybe they won't have so many ArgumentExceptions in their code (which would probably make you feel better even if you are a pacifist).

Answer 2

If you are talking about the "Break On Throw" exception feature then no there is not. It is strictly a type based feature only and does not have any way to control for what section of the code throws the exception.

Your best bet is to just place breakpoints on all of the lines which throw or temporarily suspend throwing an exception from the one place that you care about.

Answer 3

Sounds like using exceptions as flow control. If the one you're trying to debug occurs later in the program, you can try to attach the debugger later, or you can wait until after the program is running to turn on breaking when an ArgumentException is thrown.

Try to limit the scope as well - if the exception you're interested in derives from but is not exactly ArgumentException, break on that one instead.

Tell the other developer to fix his code.

Edit: In .NET 4, you can attach a handler to the AppDomain.FirstChanceException event, filter out non-ArgumentException excepitons and filter out the bad one based on the call stack.

Answer 4

The links in the comments are great.

i think Conditional Breakpoints are what you're looking for here. You can do this by right clicking your breakpoint and clicking the Condition... menu item.

Answer 5

You might be able to do this, but it depends on how the code you want to debug is located relative to the other developer's code, and whether or not you can modify (but not commit your changes) to his code.

The first thing you'll want to do is, at least temporarily, go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging in Visual Studio, and tick the "Just My Code" box. I assume this is available even in Express editions, but it may not be, and if its not available for you I'm afraid the rest of what I have to say probably won't help.

Anyway, once you have that ticked, you will no longer see break-on-throw notifications for code that isn't "yours." This means code that is from an assembly not in your .sln, or code marked with the [DebuggerNonUserCode] attribute from System.Diagnostics. What I usually do then is temporarily decorate the offending methods with [DebuggerNonUserCode] until I'm done debugging what I need to debug, and then revert those changes before checking in to souce control.

It's not as elegant as I'd like (I'd love a "never break on throws from this site again" checkbox in the exception assistant), but its better than nothing.

I believe there may be other debugger settings that could interact with how "Just My Code" works, so if this doesn't work for you let me know and I'll try to get a more accurate picture of what my settings look like when I do this.