Debugging and Error Handling

Summary

Debugging and error handling is a thankless task at the best of times, but when you develop remoting applications, you have many more hurdles to overcome. There seems to be an almost endless list of things that can go wrong, such as server unavailability, incorrect configuration at the client or server, user error, or application-specific exceptions.

In this chapter, we’ve presented several techniques to help you through the mire. First, you’ve seen the common exceptions that can typically occur in .NET remoting applications. You’ve also seen how to perform error checking at the client application and in the remoting object, to detect anomalous situations at runtime. In addition, you’ve seen how to use debug and trace messages to help you understand whether the application is behaving as expected.

At the end of the chapter, we defined custom exception classes to represent application-specific errors in the remoting object. We used the custom exception class as a natural placeholder for centralized error handling in the remoting object, such as logging all exceptions to a flat file, a database, or the Windows event log.

In the next chapter, we’ll consider some best practices that, if followed, should make your remoting applications as efficient, maintainable, and reusable as they can be.