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Could someone explain to me why it is considered inapropriate to have a try-catch in the main() method to catch any unhandled exceptions?
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
try
{
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
catch (Exception e)
{
MessageBox.Show("General error: " + e.ToString());
}
}
I have the understanding that this is bad practice, but not sure why.
743
With a try catch, you can handle an exception that may include logging, retrying failing code, or gracefully terminating the application. Without a try catch, you run the risk of encountering unhandled exceptions. Try catch statements aren't free in that they come with performance overhead.
In general, wrapping your Java code with try/catch blocks doesn't have a significant performance impact on your applications. Only when exceptions actually occur is there a negative performance impact, which is due to the lookup the JVM must perform to locate the proper handler for the exception.
It must be used within the method. If an exception occurs at the particular statement in the try block, the rest of the block code will not execute. So, it is recommended not to keep the code in try block that will not throw an exception. Java try block must be followed by either catch or finally block.
Nesting try-catch blocks severely impacts the readability of source code because it makes it to difficult to understand which block will catch which exception.
I don't think its necessarily bad practice. There are a few caveats however...
I believe the point of whoever called this "bad practice" was to reinforce the idea that you should be catching exceptions closest to where they occur (i.e. as high up the call stack as possible/appropiate). A blanket exception handler isn't typically a good idea because its drastically reduces the control flow available to you. Coarse-grained exception handling is quite importantly not a reasonable solution to program stability. Unfortunately, many beginner developers think that it is, and take such approaches as this blanket try-catch statement.
Saying this, if you have utilised exception handling properly (in a fine-grained and task-specific manner) in the rest of your program, and handled the errors accordingly there (rather than juist displaying a generic error box), then a general try-catch for all exceptions in the Main method is probably a useful thing to have. One point to note here is that if you're reproducably getting bugs caught in this Main try-catch, then you either have a bug or something is wrong with your localised exception handling.
The primary usage of this try-catch with Main would be purely to prevent your program from crashing in very unusual circumstances, and should do hardly any more than display a (vaguely) user-friendly "fatal error" message to the user, as well as possibly logging the error somewhere and/or submitting a bug report. So to conclude: this method does have its uses, but it must be done with great care, and not for the wrong reasons.
172
Well, this method will only capture exceptions thrown in your main thread. If you use both the Application.ThreadException and the AppDomian.UnhandledException events instead then you'll be able to catch and log all exceptions.
36
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