Arian Kulp's Blog
opinion, insight, and occasional code

Great error reporting

Friday, February 16, 2007 9:46 AM

So I'm working in Visual Studio Tools for Office (2005 SE) for the first time.  I've used Visual Studio Team Suite to create VSTO add-ins before, but not the specific VSTO-branded Visual Studio.  Wow.  Talk about limiting.  I'm trying to create a UserControl to host in the Task Pane (the pane on the right which houses Clip Art and Research).  When the customization runs, I get this incredibly useful message:

Yeah.  Not much for details.  I thought that I remembered getting a stack trace at this point with Team Suite.  So I think, "I know, I'll set debugging to break on all exceptions" since it's obviously handling an unhandled exception.

So I go to the Debug menu as I would in *any* other retail edition of Visual Studio, and I see:

No Exceptions menu command.  Wow.  So not only is Word handling the exception (poorly), I can't force the exception to break the code early.  My next step is to set a breakpoint in the InternalStartup method.  Waste of time.  It never gets hit.  At this point, I'm safe in saying that my code can't be throwing an exception, since apparently it's never hitting it!  I have no idea what's going on, but I'm quite frustrated.




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# re: Great error reporting

It may have the Exceptions menu item, but it's not showing it. Try right clicking the menu -> Customize -> Commands tab -> category: Debug.

I've had Visual Studio "lose" my exceptions menu item before. I haven't used that version of Visual Studio, but it might be worth trying.

Bummer about the error message. I can't stand errors that have no information. The one I really hate is "The parameter is incorrect" 2/16/2007 10:58 AM | David Hogue



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