Building a Service App: Intro & Unhandled Exceptions

Introduction

We do a lot of service applications where I work. Most of them are self-hosted. That means a lot of console-style apps. This post is to document some of the stuff we're doing, so we have something of a common template.

We'll be using a few tools/technologies:

• NuGet
• Castle.Windsor
• Castle's WcfIntegration Facility
• NLog
• CommonServiceLocator

The example code will be hosted on GitHub.

We'll get started with a basic unhandled exception handler. This will give us a way to capture the error when the application won't even start, and hasn't had time to initialize the logging framework.

Program.Main() and Unhandled Exceptions

When everything fails, including your logging mechanism, it's nice to know what happened. There's just a ton of things that can and do go wrong. One way to help catch these errors is to log to the an event log.

    public class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            try
            {
                // do something
            }
            catch (Exception exception)
            {
                var assemblyName = typeof(Program).AssemblyQualifiedName;

                if (!EventLog.SourceExists(assemblyName))
                    EventLog.CreateEventSource(assemblyName, "Application");

                var log = new EventLog { Source = assemblyName };
                log.WriteEntry(string.Format("{0}", exception), EventLogEntryType.Error);
            }
        }
    }

What we've done is place a generic exception handler in the Main() method. It catches generic exceptions, logging them all to the event log. This catches anything that hasn't been caught; your basic unhandled exception handler. Now we have a way to see what happened...

The EventLog

The captured error message.

Next...

There you have it. An easy way to capture exceptions when the worst happens. Next up, we'll take a look at dependency injection with Windsor.