michael eaton

Nick has a great article about exception handling.

A couple things caught my attention (I'll explain why later):
Don’t Eat Exceptions
Let Your Users See Exception Messages

Ok, why did these catch my attention?  Last week, I installed the ASP.NET Forums.  Well...let me back up...I installed the version of the forums that WebHost4Life (a great host, BTW) has listed in the '.NET Add-Ins' section of the Control Panel.  I had the forums setup and running, but for some reason, none of my testers were receiving the email with their password.  Hmmm...what could the problem be?  I downloaded the main assembly for the forums and opened it Reflector.  Check out the code from the 'SendEmail' method:

try {
    SmtpMail.Send(message1);

} catch (Exception) {
    return false;
}

WTF?  Thanks guys. :-\  That's helpful.  At the very least, log the damn exception somewhere.

I gave up on that particular release of the forums and installed the latest code from CommunityServer.org.  This cut of the code is fantastic.  It's extremely simple to set-up and configure (for the most part). 

Speaking of Reflector, I installed the Reflector.Graph add-in.  All I can say is “Wow”.