This is a follow up to my initial question and I would like to present my findings and ask for corrections, ideas and insights. My findings (or rather interpretations) come from people's answers to my previous question, reading MSDN .NET 3.5 documentation and debugging .NET 3.5 code. I hope this will be of value to someone who was wondering like me how to detect when an application terminates.
Events:
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.ProcessExit
: raised when process exits, e.g. after the default AppDomain
and everything else was unloaded [Total execution time is limited to just 3 seconds!]. For WPF, use System.Windows.Application.Exit
instead. For Windows Forms, run code after Application.Run(...)
in main method.
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DomainUnload
: raised when an AppDomain
other than default AppDomain
unloads, e.g. when running classes with unit testing frameworks (MbUnit with TestDriven.NET).
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException
: (if handled in default AppDomain
:) raised for any unhandled exception in any thread, no matter what AppDomain
the thread started in. This means, this can be used as the catch-all for all unhandled exceptions.
System.Windows.Application.Exit
: raised when WPF application (i.e. the default AppDomain
) exits gracefully. Override System.Windows.Application.OnExit
to take advantage of it.
Finalizers (destructors in C#): run when garbage collector frees unmanaged resources. [Total execution time is limited!].
Order of events:
WPF application: graceful exit
System.Windows.Application.Exit
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.ProcessExit
WPF application: unhandled exception
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException
MbUnit running inside TestDriven.NET: passed test (graceful exit)
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DomainUnload
MbUnit running inside TestDriven.NET: failed test (unhandled exceptions are handled by MbUnit)
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.DomainUnload
Questions:
Prompted by ssg31415926's question/answer (this question is a bit reversed), there's also Application.SessionEnding which is called when the when the user logs off or shuts down. It is called before the Exit event.