Exceptioneer founder Phil Winstanley will be speaking at several venues in 2010 about Exception Driven development.

May 2010

8th  -  DDD Scotland – Hopefully! (If the session is voted in)

June 2010

22nd  -  NxtGenUg Birmingham

August 2010

3rd   -  NxtGenUg Oxford

Colin Mackay has written up a great piece on Adding Exceptioneer to OpenRasta sites.

It’s great to see people looking at Exception handling strategies for other Frameworks.

Which frameworks would you like to see supported?

Exceptioneer now fully supports MonoTouch on the iPhone.

In the initial release we collect the StackTrace and assembly information as well as Exception details.

Future releases will work to bring in more detail about the iPhone and its current state at the time of the Exception occurring.

Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

You can now have your custom information transmitted up to Exceptioneer which may help you if you’re working on a system with lots of in process data you need to access at debug time.

All you need to do is add key value pairs to the Data object of your Exception (or Sub Exceptions).

            try 
            { 
                throw new System.NotImplementedException(); 
            }
            catch (Exception ex) 
            {

                //Add your Custom Data to the Exception
                ex.Data.Add("one", "one");
                ex.Data.Add("two", 2);
                ex.Data.Add("three", DateTime.Now);

                //Submit the Exception
                Exceptioneer.WebClient.Client C = new Exceptioneer.WebClient.Client(); 
                C.CurrentException = ex; 
                C.Submit(); 
            }

This will then be displayed along side your Stack trace information.

As well as unhandled Exceptions which Exceptioneer will automatically collect if you’re using the Exceptioneer Module you can manually collect Exceptions too, this is done in three lines of code like this.

            try
            {
                throw new System.NotImplementedException();
            }
            catch(Exception ex)
            {
                Exceptioneer.WebClient.Client C = new Exceptioneer.WebClient.Client();
                C.CurrentException = ex;
                C.Submit();
            }

Let us know if you have any queries or questions about this!

As ever at Pixel Programming we’ve had a busy few days getting more Exceptioneer features finished off.

We now have an Exceptioneer demo site on which you can create exceptions then check out how both Exceptioneer and ELMAH show them to you.

As well as the demo site which helps people explore the features of Exceptioneer we’ve also added a range of performance and usability changes tot he system which will mean our users will have an all round better experience.

Another feature we added was RSS feeds, you can see a sample feed from the demo site by logging in and clicking the link at the top of the page.

We’ll very soon be releasing invitations out to our existing users to allow them to invite other users to try out Exceptioneer so keep an eye on your Projects page!

We’ve been working hard on Exceptioneer over the past few weeks getting some great new features implemented but whilst we’ve been doing all that people are starting to wonder what our plans are for Exceptioneer.

Well, great news – anyone with a free account now or when they sign up later will get all of the features and functionality the site currently supports, this includes: -

• ASP.NET Exception Handling
• JavaScript Exception Handling
• Windows .NET Exception Handling
• Alerting

You can use your free account for commercial or personal use.

So what are the limits with the free accounts?

Well, currently we’re limiting the free accounts to 3 active projects (and the ability to delete 3 projects) and we’ll be introducing targeted advertising (development tools, components etc) into the free accounts.

What will paid accounts have?

We’re working on some amazingly cool features which we’ll be releasing soon, some of these features will only be available to paid accounts.

 We were going to build a desktop client for Exceptioneer notifications, then we had a bit of a lightbulb moment. We use and love twitter and have a client sitting on our desktops, be they Windows, Mac or our Mobile Devices.

Exceptioneer can now send you a direct message through Twitter with an Exception notification either on each new instance of an Exception or just the first time it's encountered.

This is useful if you are looking for something other than email for notifications or wish to use a twitter account for a project. You can also have email and Twitter notifications running alongside one another if you like.

It’s really simple to set up.

• Follow the twitter user @Exceptioneer
• Log into Exceptioneer, go to the My Alerts page and enter the Twitter username that's now following @Exceptioneer
• Set-up your Twitter notification preferences. Here's an example of the kind of settings you can choose.

• Wait for the notifications, here's one that appeared in my Windows Twitter client Twhirl: -

We think this will really add an extra dimension to your Exception notifications. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Whilst we all enjoy trawling through event logs looking for exceptions that have occurred in our Windows based .NET applications it’s sometimes nicer to have those exceptions come to us. With that in mind, we’ve put together a Windows Forms Exceptioneer client which is compatible with Windows Services and Console Applications too.

These errors will appear in Exceptioneer just like ASP.NET and JavaScript errors and we’ll give you all the information you’ll need to help you debug the applications remotely. Here you can see the code and a stack trace from an Exception thrown in a Windows Forms application on the Exceptioneer site.

Implementation is very simple, just reference the WindowsFormsClient assembly in your application and then wrap your executing code in a try {} catch {} block.

using Exceptioneer.WindowsFormsClient
        
namespace YourNamespace
{
    static class Program
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main()
        {
            try
            {
                Application.EnableVisualStyles();
                Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
                Application.Run(new Form1());
            }
            catch(Exception Ex)
            {
                Client WC = new Client();
                WC.ApiKey = "YOUR API KEY";
                WC.ApplicationName = "YOUR APPLICATION NAME";
                WC.CurrentException = Ex;
                WC.Submit();
            }
        }
    }
}

We’d love to hear your feedback on the Windows Forms, Windows Services and Console Application Exception Handler. Let us know what you think.

Client side errors which occur in JavaScript can really cause a distraction and irritation for your end users, and with the plethora of different browsers and operating system combinations it can be very difficult to totally test your applications.

To help discover and resolve JavaScript issues we’ve implemented an end to end JavaScript error handler into Exceptioneer.

Now every time there’s a client side exception on your site, it can be reported back to Exceptioneer in just the same way your server side exceptions are handled giving you a clean and useful report as so: -

We give you the information you need to sort out the client side problems your sites might face as well as the server side issues including the Browser, version, operating system and location of the errors.

What’s more it’s a doddle to implement on your ASP.NET sites. The first thing you need to do is wire up the HttpHandler in your web.config file as so: -

<add path="ExceptioneerJavaScript.axd" verb="GET,POST" type="Exceptioneer.WebClient.JavaScriptHandler, Exceptioneer.WebClient" />

Then Just add a Script to your pages which references the handler passing in the right query string value (as shown below).

<script src="/ExceptioneerJavaScript.axd?Reporter=true" language="javascript"></script>

Then, whenever our JavaScript error handler detects and catches an error, details will be packaged up and sent back to the Exceptioneer service where you can manage them.

So why not download the latest Web Client and wire it up for your JavaScript errors too?