Comments on: “Icky” Decisions

By: Keith Dahlby

Keith Dahlby — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:12:06 +0000

I completely agree with Chris that a logged exception is preferable to an empty catch{}. And of course observers should do all they can to avoid throwing in unexceptional circumstances.

In my view, the ickyness isn’t so much that the observer has to observe “with caution”, but that there’s not really a good mechanism to catch bad but not fatal exceptions – if my observer throws an OutOfMemoryException, is that really something I can recover from? As with all things, the answer is “it depends”, but worth some thought.

It’s also worth pointing out that catch(Exception) is changing in .NET 4 to not catch “process corrupting” exceptions by default. http://bit.ly/adlDjg

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:31:43 +0000

Yeah, from the guy who works on some event-driven service bus thingy. It’s a tough call and one I’ve made a few times too. Not ideal for sure.

By: Chris Patterson

Chris Patterson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:27:16 +0000

catch(Exception ex)
{
_log.Error(“Consumer Exception not caught.”, ex);
}

At least they can learn something from this, compared to eating the exception without even a burp.

And you should catch per event consumer, not a global one because an early failure would prevent other consumers from know about the event.

Not that I have any experience with any of this stuff.