Why AccessViolationException cannot be caught by .NET4.0

Question

It is really interesting that the following C# code will crash on .NET4.0 but work fine on .NET2.0.

C# code

class Program
{
    stat         


        

Answer 1

Yes, it changed in .NET 4. You cannot catch exceptions that indicate a corrupted state. This is because there's pretty much no guarantee that you can do anything at all when a corrupted state exception is thrown. There is practically no reason to want a process with corrupted state to continue executing.

For compatibility with older code, you can change this behaviour by adding the legacyCorruptedStateExceptionsPolicy element to app.config.

You can also do it on a case-by-case basis by marking methods where you want to catch these exceptions with the HandleProcessCorruptedStateExceptions attribute.