Exceptional Exception Handling - Sat, 21 Nov 2009

For the beta, I want to fix all outstanding errors in Behold. There are certain types of errors that are of the type that can make a program crash. It will be stuck there and not continue or even allow you to close the program. Often the only way out is to use Ctrl-Alt-Delete and start the Task Manager and use it to end the hung program.

Examples of an exception is an array out of bounds, accessing an invalid memory location, or a division by zero. Often an error message pops up that has some fancy wording that is unintelligible to most people, but once leaving the message box, the program gets lost.

So with the help of a program called EurekaLog, Behold will now pop up a friendly box whenever one of these exceptions happens:

The beauty of this is that it will capture all the debug information and allow the person using Behold to easily send me an email containing mostly everything I need to find and fix the problem.

Now I’m sure you’re saying “I’ve seen this before”. Of course you have. Windows does this to you all the time. You often have things pop up like this:

I’ve often clicked on the “Send Error Report” button. But with Microsoft, I’ve never got any response back. So much so, that I almost feel I’m sending these things into a black hole that they just ignore.

To be fair, they probably get millions of them, all the same, for the same problem. And they most likely do fix the problem for the next release. They just can’t get back to every one of the millions who submit it.

What this also does is let Behold encounter its severe errors gracefully. Behold should not get stuck. If in that run it encounters 2 more errors, you’ll then get an  option to terminate the program.

I hope this will save me time and you from the annoyance of possible program crashes during the beta.