What is the best practice for capturing all inner exception details? [duplicate]

Question

What is the best practice for logging complete exception details including all possible inner exceptions?

Currently, I use the following code:

try
{
    //some code that throws an exception
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
    do
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ex.Message+ex.StackTrace);
        ex=ex.InnerException;
    }while(ex!=null)
}

Are there any scenarios where this code may fail?

Answer 1

Have you tried just using ex.ToString()? It gives most (if not all) of the data you need to diagnose - including the message details, stack trace, and inner exceptions:

From MSDN:

ToString returns a representation of the current exception that is intended to be understood by humans. Where the exception contains culture-sensitive data, the string representation returned by ToString is required to take into account the current system culture. Although there are no exact requirements for the format of the returned string, it should attempt to reflect the value of the object as perceived by the user. The default implementation of ToString obtains the name of the class that threw the current exception, the message, the result of calling ToString on the inner exception, and the result of calling Environment.StackTrace. If any of these members is null, its value is not included in the returned string.

Answer 2

I have this extension method which suits my purposes just fine.

public static class ExceptionExtensions {
    public static string ToMessageAndCompleteStacktrace(this Exception exception) {
        Exception e = exception;
        StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder();
        while (e != null) {
            s.AppendLine("Exception type: " + e.GetType().FullName);
            s.AppendLine("Message       : " + e.Message);
            s.AppendLine("Stacktrace:");
            s.AppendLine(e.StackTrace);
            s.AppendLine();
            e = e.InnerException;
        }
        return s.ToString();
    }
}

And use it like this:

using SomeNameSpaceWhereYouStoreExtensionMethods;
try {
    // Some code that throws an exception
}
catch(Exception ex) {
    Console.WriteLine(ex.ToMessageAndCompleteStacktrace());
}

Update

Since I'm receiving upvotes for this answer I want to add that I stopped using this extension method, and now I'm just using exception.ToString(). It gives more information. So please, stop using this method, and just use .ToString(). See the answer above.