Why is TargetInvocationException treated as uncaught by the IDE?

c# exception reflection propertyinfo targetinvocationexception
Jason Coyne picture Jason Coyne · Apr 17, 2010 · Viewed 21.6k times · Source

I have some code that is using reflection to pull property values from an object. In some cases the properties may throw exceptions, because they have null references, etc.

object result;
try
{
    result = propertyInfo.GetValue(target, null);

}
catch (TargetInvocationException ex)
{
    result = ex.InnerException.Message;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    result = ex.Message;
}

Ultimately the code works correctly, however when I am running under the debugger:

When the property throws an exception, the IDE drops into the debugger as if the exception was uncaught. If I just hit run, the program flows through and the exception comes out as a TargetInvocationException with the real exception in the InnerException property.

How can I stop this from happening?

Answer

Kirill Osenkov picture Kirill Osenkov · May 14, 2010

This seems to be "by design". What happens is that you likely have menu Tools → Options → Debugging → General → Enable Just My Code enabled.

As How to: Break on User-Unhandled Exceptions states:

The Debug → Exceptions dialog shows an additional column (Break when an exception is User-unhandled) when "Enable Just My Code" is on.

Essentially this means that whenever the exception is leaving the boundary of your code (and in this case, it falls through down to the .NET framework reflection code), Visual Studio breaks because it thinks that the exception has left the user code. It doesn't know that it will return into the user code later in the stack.

So there are two workarounds: Disable Just My Code in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → General or Remove the check box from the User-unhandled .NET Framework exceptions in menu Debug → Exceptions dialog.

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