How to log all thrown exceptions?

Question

How to log any exceptions that were thrown and catched? Something like Visual Studio's IntelliTrace do. Or is there a way to integrate InteliTrace into debug version of application and then view its logs?

Update: I'll clarify that a bit. I want standard .txt (or any custom) logs, the format doesn't matter. The main point is I want to log all exceptions that occurred in all third-party libraries without adding code to them.

Answer 1

I guess the feature you are searching for is called FirstChanceException and can be accessed via the AppDomain.FirstChanceException Event

Essentially this event provides a hook to get information about any (managed) exception getting thrown in the AppDomain. You can not handle the Exception this way! It is only a sort of notification

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Update: regarding your comment about a "swallowed exception" on another answer - and just a shot into the dark:
On x64 systems exceptions that get thrown in a windows' onLoad method can not be caught in your Main() method.
see this SO article for reference

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Update 2: As for Threads I think that you would have to implement it yourself. This would involve some sort of polling and would harm performance, but I guess for debugging it is OK in most cases. This could be done using

var threads = Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads; 

Answer 2

You might go with aspects. If for example you take PostSharp, and write an aspect that creates a try-catch for every function, logging is done in the aspect. After logging just rethrow it.

Example code from their website to have a complete answer with demo code:

/// <summary> /// Aspect that, when applied on a method, catches all its exceptions, /// assign them a GUID, log them, and replace them by an <see cref="InternalException"/>. /// </summary> [Serializable] public class ExceptionPolicyAttribute : OnExceptionAspect {     /// <summary>     /// Method invoked upon failure of the method to which the current     /// aspect is applied.     /// </summary>     /// <param name="args">Information about the method being executed.</param>     public override void OnException(MethodExecutionArgs args)     {         Guid guid = Guid.NewGuid();          Trace.TraceError("Exception {0} handled by ExceptionPolicyAttribute: {1}",             guid, args.Exception.ToString());          throw new InternalException(             string.Format("An internal exception has occurred. Use the id {0} " +                 "for further reference to this issue.", guid));     } } 

Edit:

You could use any logger like log4net, NLog or the enterprise library ( my preferred way of doing logging and some other stuff ). But that isn't really the task here. The task is - IMHO - to inject logging into the project with as less manual coding as possible.