ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Journeyman programmers know that proper error handling is critical to the operation of an application. Without it, your chances of making the application fault tolerant are less than remote. Taking the time to plan an error-handling strategy in the early stages of a project can pay off as the project progresses. Yet, too often error handling is given short shrift, for want of time, interest, awareness, accessibility, and who knows what.

Fortunately, error handling has been greatly improved in ASP.NET, making it more approachable and easier to implement than classic ASP. Taking a page or two from the Java playbook, ASP.NET provides state-of-the-art handling of errors with exceptions and error-handler events.

The error-handling model in ASP.NET lets you handle errors easily at the method, page, and application levels of your web applications. Most applications will use some combination of these to handle problems when they arise. In this chapter, we have included recipes for handling errors at each level:

Method level

When does it make sense to handle errors locally versus letting them propagate to a higher level? In general, you want to handle recoverable errors in the method where they occur and let nonrecoverable errors propagate up. Recipe 8.1 details this subject. It helps you understand all the nuances of the Try…Catch…Finally block and includes sets of if…then solution statements and leading questions to help you choose how to implement error handling in a routine. ...