Plugin Exception Handling c#

James Plahitko

I am writing my first plugin. I attempted to test a try-catch in a function using a divide by zero statement. It seems Notepad++ catches all exceptions, and in my test case, it reports, dumps and exits rather harshly.

Is it possible and is there a recommended method for catching an exception before it bubbles up to Notepad++?

Mark Olson

@James-Plahitko

Is it possible and is there a recommended method for catching an exception before it bubbles up to Notepad++?

~~What language are you using?~~ Edit: oh duh, it’s C#, look at the post title.
The best way to catch an exception before it bubbles up in NPP is just the language’s default way of catching exceptions.

Now would be a very natural place to include examples of proper try/catch syntax, but I’m not going to discuss best practices for catching exceptions in programming languages, because that is a general programming issue and not a Notepad++ issue, and thus not appropriate for this forum.
That said, there is one important related question that is more specific to Notepad++, and that is whether to notify the user (via a message box, or audible ding, or whatever) when an error occurs.

That said, most plugins are open-source, which means you can look at the source code of your favorite plugin (in the same language you’re using) to get a sense of how they handle errors.

James Plahitko

My issue was two-fold. The try-catch syntax was basically correct. However, I was technically sloppy in visual studio allowing the exception type to auto-fill the ArgumentException type. The “divide by zero” exception was not being caught.

The second issue was re-throwing the exception and Notepad was picking it up. In this case, I don’t want Notepad to react. Life is good now.

Thank you Mark for your suggestions.