c++ - Why does my MFC app hang when I throw an exception?

Question

If you throw an exception from inside an MFC dialog, the app hangs, even if you have a catch block in your code. It refuses to respond to the mouse or keyboard, and the only way to shut it down is to use Task Manager.

Why I'm posting this question

To my shame, there is a popular shrink-wrapped application that hangs every time it encounters an exceptional error in a modal dialog. When we made a massive shift from integer error codes to exceptions, I was responsible for choosing std::exception as the base class for the thrown exceptions. It wasn't until a huge amount of work went into the conversion that our testing uncovered this problem, and by then it was too late to change. Hopefully this question/answer will keep someone from making the same mistake.

Answer 1

The code for CDialog::DoModal makes the dialog modal by disabling the parent window. When the dialog code returns, the window is reenabled. There is an explicit catch for CException* errors, but not for any other kind of thrown exception; thus the parent window never gets reenabled.

Change your code to throw a pointer to any exception derived from CException, and you'll fix the problem.