Handling Exceptions on Windows Phone 7

In this post I’ll outline how to deal with exceptions in a Windows Phone 7 application. Ideally when an exception happens, we want to display some meaningful information to the user that can be provided to the developer to aid in the debugging of the issue. The worst thing that can happen is for the application to crash and just exit. This can lead to frustration on the users part (as I’ve experienced with the official Twitter application on iOS 4.0), or worse dissuade a user from purchasing any other applications bearing your name.

In this example, when an exception occurs, we’ll ensure that we navigate to an error page, and display the stack trace. Aside, this is obviously not the best thing to display to an end user. The best approach may be to display a generic error message with an option to report the error, which then emails the exception information to your support address. I leave that as an exercise to the reader, in this example, we’ll just display the stack trace information directly to the user:

1. Add a new Windows Phone Portrait Page to your Windows Phone 7 project in Visual Studio. For the purpose of this example, I’ve named the page ‘Error.xaml’.

2. In ‘Error.xaml’, locate the ‘LayoutRoot’ Grid element, and replace its content with the following:















3. The page you created above will act as the container for any exceptions that we need to display. Next, open up ‘Error.xaml.cs’, and add the following code:


using System.Windows.Navigation;
...
...

public static Exception Exception;

// Executes when the user navigates to this page.
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
ErrorText.Text = Exception.ToString();
}

This sets up an Exception Object that is hooked up to ErrorText.Text upon navigating to the page.

4. Finally, we need to hook up an event handler that ensures that we navigate to this page whenever an unhandled exception occurs. This is done from ‘App.xaml.cs’. Open up ‘App.xaml.cs’, and replace the content of the ‘Application_UnhandledException’ function with the following code:


if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
{
// An unhandled exception has occurred; break in the debugger
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();
}

// Running on a device / emulator without debugging
e.Handled = true;
Error.Exception = e.ExceptionObject;
(RootVisual as Microsoft.Phone.Controls.PhoneApplicationFrame).Source =
new Uri("/Error.xaml", UriKind.Relative);

If you have completed the above steps correctly, then whenever an unhandled exception occurs in your application, the application will navigate to this page, and display the exception stack trace.

To verify these steps, add a button to your ‘MainPage.xaml’ and have it link to a page that doesn’t exist, e.g.


NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/NotHere.xaml", UriKind.Relative));

Launch the application in the emulator, and click the button you just created, (You’ll need to launch without debugging). The result should be navigation to ‘Error.xaml’ with the exception details:

Windows Phone Error Example