The Moth

Following from previous entry. If you are working with the Compact Framework 1.0, you should know that exceptions on background threads do result in the unhandled exception dialog appearing on screen. Also on the CF there are no registry entries to configure.

If you wish to add global exception handling to CF apps, you are out of luck. There is no support for Application.ThreadException or AppDomain.UnhandledException. You might think that using a try..catch around the entry point would work, however that is a bad idea. There are three scenarios when you do that:
1. Exceptions on the main GUI thread
2. Exceptions on background threads
3. Exception occurs in the GUI thread as a result of a Control.Invoke from a background thread (which you must do to update GUI areas)

The first scenario is OK - the exceptions are caught and your catch code will run. Your catch code will not run for the second case; in fact the built-in dialog will appear.

The third case is the worst, and I classify this as a bug: in this scenario your app will freeze/lock (and of course your catch code after Application.Run will not run).

So, no centralised global error handling on the CF.

Next time we'll look at how things change with VS2005 and .NET v2.0