How to: Handle Exceptions in Parallel Loops
The For and ForEach overloads do not have any special mechanism to handle exceptions that might be thrown. In this respect, they resemble regular for and foreach loops (For and For Each in Visual Basic).
When you add your own exception-handling logic to parallel loops, handle the case in which similar exceptions might be thrown on multiple threads concurrently, and the case in which an exception thrown on one thread causes another exception to be thrown on another thread. You can handle both cases by wrapping all exceptions from the loop in a System.AggregateException. The following example shows one possible approach.
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When "Just My Code" is enabled, Visual Studio in some cases will break on the line that throws the exception and display an error message that says "exception not handled by user code." This error is benign. You can press F5 to continue from it, and see the exception-handling behavior that is demonstrated in the example below. To prevent Visual Studio from breaking on the first error, just uncheck the "Just My Code" checkbox under Tools, Options, Debugging, General. |
In this example, all exceptions are caught and then wrapped in an System.AggregateException which is thrown. The caller can decide which exceptions to handle.
' How to: Handle Exceptions in Parallel Loops Imports System.Collections.Concurrent Imports System.Threading.Tasks Module ExceptionsInLoops Sub Main() ' Create some random data to process in parallel. ' There is a good probability this data will cause some exceptions to be thrown. Dim data(1000) As Byte Dim r As New Random() r.NextBytes(data) Try ProcessDataInParallel(data) Catch ae As AggregateException ' This is where you can choose which exceptions to handle. For Each ex As Exception In ae.InnerExceptions If (TypeOf (ex) Is ArgumentException) Then Console.WriteLine(ex.Message) Else Throw ex End If Next End Try Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit.") Console.ReadKey() End Sub Sub ProcessDataInParallel(ByVal data As Byte()) ' Use ConcurrentQueue to enable safe enqueueing from multiple threads. Dim exceptions As New ConcurrentQueue(Of Exception) ' Execute the complete loop and capture all exceptions. Parallel.ForEach(Of Byte)(data, Sub(d) Try ' Cause a few exceptions, but not too many. If d < &H3 Then Throw New ArgumentException(String.Format("value is {0:x}. Element must be greater than &H3", d)) Else Console.Write(d & " ") End If Catch ex As Exception ' Store the exception and continue with the loop. exceptions.Enqueue(ex) End Try End Sub) ' Throw the exceptions here after the loop completes. If exceptions.Count > 0 Then Throw New AggregateException(exceptions) End If End Sub End Module
