InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Review: Exception Hunter

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Apr 14, 2008

Sections
Development
Topics
.NET ,
Debugging
Tags
Static Analysis

Unhandled exceptions are the bane of any application, especially those that run without user interaction. Ideally, the compiler would detect and alert developers to these potential issues, but current .NET compilers cannot even determine which exceptions might be thrown.

To address this Red Gate has released Exception Hunter. This tool analyzes methods to determine which exceptions they can throw. The reports can be viewed interactively or chained to an automated build process like CruiseControl.

Like most Red Gate software, Exception Hunter has a simple and straightforward interface. But unfortunately, simplicity does not always translate into ease of use. While the tool is capable of generating reports, it can only do so from the command line. This simple task isn't to be found anywhere in the GUI.

More frustrating is that the method list does not indicate which methods actually throw exceptions. Some methods are in bold, but that just means the method is not inherited form a base class. The user has to drill into each method separately.

All this could be overlooked except for one thing, the number of false positive is ridiculously high. Consider this simple VB application

Source Code

The exceptions these few lines can throw include:

  • ArgumentException 6
  • ArgumentNullException 4, 6
  • ArgumentOutOfRangeException 4, 5, 6
  • FormatException 4, 6
  • IndexOutOfRangeException 6
  • InvalidCastException 6
  • InvalidOperationException 6
  • ObjectDisposedException 6
  • IO.PathTooLongException 6
  • NotSupportedException 6
  • NullReferenceException 6
  • OutOfMemoryException 4, 5, 6

One could only imagine the noise a non-trivial application would generate.

While effective exception analysis would be a boon to the industry, Red Gate's Exception Hunter demonstrates that we just are not to that point yet. And one has to wonder if this is even a solvable problem.

Reflector Add-In by Jason Bock Posted
  1. Back to top

    Reflector Add-In

    by Jason Bock

    I've been working on a Reflector add-in that does something similar to this tool. It's on CodePlex:

    www.codeplex.com/ExFinderReflector

Educational Content

Jesper Boeg on Priming Kanban

In this interview, Jesper Boeg, author of the new InfoQ book – Priming Kanban, discusses the keys to using Kanban effectively, and how to get started if you are currently using other approaches.

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.