C# – Don’t stop debugger at THAT exception when it’s thrown and caught

.net-3.5cdebuggingnetvisual-studio-2008

In tools/exceptions, I've set the option that the debugger stops when an exception is thrown. Whether it is caught or not .

How do I exclude an exception of that rule? Somewhere in my code there is a caught exception that is part of the program logic. So I obviously don't want that exception to stop the debugger each time it is hit.

Example: I want to ignore the nullreference exception (which is caught) on line 344 . I want to stop at all other exceptions

Best Answer

DebuggerHidden is your friend!

The common language runtime attaches no semantics to this attribute. It is provided for use by source code debuggers. For example, the Visual Studio 2005 debugger does not stop in a method marked with this attribute and does not allow a breakpoint to be set in the method. Other debugger attributes recognized by the Visual Studio 2005 debugger are the DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute and the DebuggerStepThroughAttribute.

Tested on VS2010 and works great.

While DebuggerStepThrough seems to also work for some specific debugger versions, DebuggerHidden seems to work for a wider range of situations based on the comments to both answers.

Note that both options do not currently work with iterator block methods or for async/await methods. This could be fixed in a later update of Visual Studio.

Note that it does not work with combination of .NET Core + Rider, you can vote the issue.

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Visual Studio: How to break on handled exceptions

With a solution open, go to the Debug - Exceptions (Ctrl+D,E) menu option. From there you can choose to break on Thrown or User-unhandled exceptions.

EDIT: My instance is set up with the C# "profile" perhaps it isn't there for other profiles?

Adjust the visual studio “Break when an exception is thrown” options programmatically

You can turn them on/off through Visual Studio's automation API (called DTE). Take a look at the Debugger3.ExceptionGroups API. For example:

' Turn off NullArgumentException.
Dim debugger As Debugger3 = DTE.Debugger
Dim exceptionGroup As ExceptionSettings = dbg.ExceptionGroups.Item("Common Language Runtime Exceptions")
exceptionGroup.SetBreakWhenThrown(False, "System.NullArgumentException")

So you could easily write a macro to turn specific exceptions on / off. To invoke the macro from your application you can launch "devenv /command".

Alternatively, you can use DTE from out-of proc and automate Visual Studio directly (no macros involved).

More info:

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual-studio – Visual Studio: How to break on handled exceptions

Adjust the visual studio “Break when an exception is thrown” options programmatically

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