Sometimes when we encounter behavior in our dev tools that we don't like, we will drop everything to figure out how to get around it. Sometimes we just accept it and move on.

I know that I hate when my clients choose "accept and move on" when they are using my apps. "Let me know," I tell them. "The app is there to make your life easier, so give me a chance to fix the behavior."

Well I have been accepting a very frustrating problem with debuggin in VS2008 for a long time. I don't even remember when it started. I somehow had lost the ability to break when there is an unhandled exception. I've relied on this feature since I began coding in VB4!

This column had disappeared form the Exception dialog.

So for the last [very long time] I have literally had to turn the exception breaks on and off, on and off, in order to find problems. If i left it always on, it would break at every exception, even handled ones.

I have no idea why I lived with this. It was really aggravating and slowed me down terribly at times. Finally I decided to get to the bottom of it.

It turns out that it is related to setting up source code debugging. One of the steps is to turn off "Just My Code" in the debugger options.

But the requirement for User-Unhandled exception breaking is that "Just My Code" needs to be turned on.

So even though it's a rarity that I introduce bugs into my code (okay, I admit, that's just a small joke), now I'll have a much easier time getting to the bottom of them.