Break on first-chance exception in Web Assembly debugger

[TanayParikh]

Update: The actual request here is being able to have the debugger break if there's an unhandled exception. Please disregard the stuff about AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException.

---

Original report

Looks like this is an issue impacting the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blazor/comments/vhrrl1/blazor_wasm_how_to_break_on_unhandled_exception/

Ideally we can hook into the System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException as we do with WebView for WinForms / WPF.

Repro:

Index.razor:

<button @onclick="ThrowException">Throw Exception</button>

@code {
    public void ThrowException()
    {
        throw new Exception("throwing new ex");
    }
}

Program.cs:

System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException += (sender, error) =>
{
    System.Console.WriteLine("!!! Encountered exception !!!");
};

Expected: !!! Encountered exception !!! console output
Actual: The exception breaks the world // stack trace dumps to console

Kind of related: dotnet/maui#5535

[javiercn]

@TanayParikh if its about breaking when an exception happens, we shouldn't do anything in the framework for it, "Break for first chance exceptions" is a debugger feature. We should make sure that it works in all platforms.

[jasonswearingen]

Yes the issue described in that reddit post is the inability to break on unhandled exceptions.

[TanayParikh]

if its about breaking when an exception happens, we shouldn't do anything in the framework for it, "Break for first chance exceptions" is a debugger feature.

Yes the issue described in that reddit post is the inability to break on unhandled exceptions.

Just making sure we aren't talking about two different things. I believe @javiercn is saying the framework doesn't have to automatically support breaking on unhandled exceptions using a first chance mechanism like we see with C# in VS.

@jasonswearingen are you perhaps suggesting that it's not possible to manually break on unhandled exceptions at all? In that case, wouldn't a mechanism like System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException be ideal so that users are able to set breakpoints for unhandled exceptions should they occur?

[jasonswearingen]

@jasonswearingen are you perhaps suggesting that it's not possible to manually break on unhandled exceptions at all? In that case, wouldn't a mechanism like System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.UnhandledException be ideal so that users are able to set breakpoints for unhandled exceptions should they occur?

Perhaps that is the best workaround for the issue, but I prefer not to speculate, as perhaps setting a breakpoint in a global exception handler might destroy state at the callsite that a proper "break on unhandled exception" would preserve.

[javiercn]

This is a functionality of the debugger, if it doesn't work, we shouldn't workaround anything in the framework. We should report it to the right folks to make sure that the experience is fixed. The instructions below are for VS, but applies to VS Code and VS 4 Mac in the same way.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/managing-exceptions-with-the-debugger?view=vs-2022#tell-the-debugger-to-break-when-an-exception-is-thrown

Thanks for contacting us.
We're moving this issue to the .NET 7 Planning milestone for future evaluation / consideration. Because it's not immediately obvious that this is a bug in our framework, we would like to keep this around to collect more feedback, which can later help us determine the impact of it. We will re-evaluate this issue, during our next planning meeting(s).
If we later determine, that the issue has no community involvement, or it's very rare and low-impact issue, we will close it - so that the team can focus on more important and high impact issues.
To learn more about what to expect next and how this issue will be handled you can read more about our triage process here.

[jasonswearingen]

@javiercn related, do you know if unhandled exceptions are able to be breakpoint triggered in MAUI Blazor WebView? The description of this issue dotnet/maui#4441 imples that it works, but upon closing it is not clear that this is actually working
I ask because I might consider attempting BlazorWebview as a dev workflow if thrown exceptions get too frustrating in the short term

[javiercn]

@jasonswearingen as far as I know works for both exceptions thrown from JS (if you have the dev tools open and configured to break on thrown JS exceptions) and exceptions thrown from .NET if you have configured the .NET debugger to break on them.

[TanayParikh]

This is a functionality of the debugger, if it doesn't work, we shouldn't workaround anything in the framework. We should report it to the right folks to make sure that the experience is fixed.

I've reported it on the VS side here: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Blazor-WASM-Debugging-Doesnt-Catch-Unha/10079630

[TanayParikh]

@jasonswearingen I'm not sure what you mean by:

be breakpoint triggered

Generally speaking, unhandled exceptions aren't automatically caught on MAUI. This is being tracked by dotnet/maui#5535.

The first chance exception is raised for Blazor Hybrid apps on WinForms & WPF.