Short of using a profiler, is there any way inside a running program to detect first chance exceptions? Ideally, I would like to record more detailed state information that is not available once the catch block has taken over the final exception.
Happy to be corrected: If you don't handle all exceptions in each method and make sure all variables are defined outside the try-catch block then at the point the final exception is raised, you won't have access to all variables that were available in the execution context of the original exception.
Brian Adams
2008-11-02 16:00:18
+2
A:
I think the only way you can get that information in .NET is using a Debugger.
Otherwise, you'll have to develop a solution yourself for saving the state of a stackframe and having a special way to log exceptions. You'd basically be doing the same things that a memory profiler does, keep track of the instances that are created. This would be a huge performance hit though unless you limit the amount of information you are logging.
A better solution would be to use the Trace and Assert capabilities in the System.Diagnostics namespace to selectively trace the program state, or to use a logging facility (log4net, EnterpriseLibrary, NLog, roll your own simple one) to dump thread / stack / variable information as you go.
In any case, adding all this extra information is a big overhead.
EDIT: I got news of this project in my feed: NTrace. It looks like it will fit a little more of what you're trying to do.
Garo Yeriazarian
2008-11-03 02:45:04