Exception Handling

We're going to examine how to make an application more robust by handling its own exceptions, rather than permitting the system to do so. An "exception" is an offence committed by the program, which would otherwise result in the embarrassing appearance of the dreaded closure message box:-
or its more elaborate counterpart in Windows NT.

What exception handling does... The idea of exception handling (often called "Structured Exception Handling") is that your application instals one or more callback routines called "exception handlers" at run-time and then, if an exception occurs, the system will call the routine to let the application deal with the exception. The hope would be that the exception handler may be able to repair the exception and continue running either from the same area of code where the exception occurred, or from a "safe place" in the code as if nothing had happened.

No closure message box would then be displayed and the user would be done the wiser. As part of this repair it may be necessary to close handles, close temporary files, free device contexts, free memory areas, inform other threads, then unwind the stack or close down the offending thread. During this process the exception handler may make a record of what it is doing and save this to a file for later analysis.