ASP.NET 5 - Development Exception

ASP.NET 5 - Development Exception

Brett M. Nelson - Thursday, October 29, 2015

Sometimes when you are working on a web application you are going to though an exception or two. When this happens it might be nice if your project returns a more complete error page than a Server 500 exception.

As before we will be starting with an empty web project and adding to it. Before this demo you should already configure your project for MVC similar to what can be seen in ASP.NET 5 MVC Controllers: Setup and ASP.NET 5 MVC Controllers: Controllers but use

Enter app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage()

With ASP.NET 5 you can add robust error output when a server error occurs by adding a dependency for Microsoft.AspNet.Diagnostics in your project.json. So your dependencies should look something like this:

project.json Dependencies
"dependencies": {
    "Microsoft.AspNet.IISPlatformHandler": "1.0.0-beta8",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel": "1.0.0-beta8",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.StaticFiles": "1.0.0-beta8",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc": "6.0.0-beta8",
    "Microsoft.AspNet.Diagnostics": "1.0.0-beta8"
  }

Now to make use of the diagnostic features you just imported to your project we need to add the proper configuration to the startup.cs Configure method. In the startup.cs’s Configure add this line app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage(); so your Configure method should look similar to this:

startup.cs Configure Method
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)  
{
    app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();

    // Add the platform handler to the request pipeline.
    app.UseIISPlatformHandler();

    app.UseStaticFiles();
    app.UseMvc(routes =>
    {
         routes.MapRoute(
             name: "default",
             template: "{controller=Home}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
    });
}

In an application you plan on using for production I would recommend only using the developers exceptions in the development environment. We’ll probably talk about that at a later time so we will skip the details of how for now.

Now you may be wondering what the UseDeveloperExceptionPage extension method does, well according to the summary it

Captures synchronous and asynchronous exceptions from the pipeline and generates HTML error responses. Full error details are only displayed by default if 'host.AppMode' is set to 'development' in the IApplicationBuilder.Properties.

Did you get that? It creates HTML error responses with full details when the app is built in development. So now if you are have server side code that was throwing an exception instead of

Server 500

Sever 500 Error

We get something somewhat useful, like this:

Error Message

Error message

In case you are wondering to generate this error I changed the name of a variable inside a foreach loop of a razor view.

There’s more to the Microsoft.AspNet.Diagnostics package but this should help you get started. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will see how I can help.

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