Handling Unhandled ASP.NET Exceptions
Gain insight into your 500 errors
At some point in their career everyone who creates ASP.NET applications has had issues with their site throwing exceptions that aren't trapped. We end up displaying a friendly error page at best, and at worst display the yellow ASP.NET error screen of death. Generally speaking it's best practice to configure your ASP.NET application to use friendly error pages so that your users aren't presented with an exception and stack trace that are meaningless to them.
Unhandled Addin Exceptions vs. Visual Studio
Keep your addin from crashing visual studio
One of the most frustrating things I've found when programming addins for visual studio is the inability to globally trap unhandled exceptions the way that you can when authoring a windows application. Essentially visual studio intercepts exceptions your addin throws that you neglect to handle. The worst part is that you don't get any information about the exception before visual studio crashes! Its great that Microsoft gets a dump of the crash, but you're left standing empty handed and scratching your head.