ASP.net MVC [HandleError] not catching exceptions

Question

In two different application, one a custom the other the sample MVC application you get with a new VS2008 MVC project, [HandleError] is not catching exceptions.

In t

Answer 1

I have struggled with this as well and I believe I understand the problem now.

In short the requirements for having [HandleError] work as expected are:

You must enable custom errors in web.config AND you must also specify where your error view is in the tag.

Example:

Leaving off the defaultRedirect="Error" part will instead yield a 500 error in the browser--NOT the ASP.NET error page (YSOD).

Also you do not have to be in Release mode. I tested this with a Debug build and it worked fine.

My environment was Visual Studio 2010 using .NET 4 and the standard, "ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Application" project template.

What confused me was the MSDN documentation for the HandleErrorAttribute Class. It doesn't explicitly say you must turn on custom errors in web.config. And I assumed all I needed was the [Handle Error] attribute.