How to force an exception while debugging in Visual Studio?

Question

I am running my application in debug mode, and I would like to manually throw an exception (i.e. not from within the code). Is there any way to do this?

Of course, running throw new Exception("My forced exception"); in the Command or Immediate window doesn't work.

EDIT: I want the exception to be caught by the try-catch statement that surrounds the code I'm debugging.

Answer 1

One possible way is to break on a line and manually change a nullable variable in the code path to null just before an operation on it occurs. This will cause a NullReferenceException to be thrown.

Answer 2

You could add a method similar to:

public static void ThrowAnException(string message) {     throw new ApplicationException(message); } 

Then, using the Immediate window, you could call ThrowAnException("Whoops")