Why does Visual Studio always break on user-handled exceptions?

I’ve been suffering this for ages. I can’t believe it’s taken this long to find the simple answer.

Does your Debug->Exceptions dialog box look like this?

Mine does. And when you want to debug and catch your exceptions in Silverlight, you have to check the ‘Thrown’ box next to Common Language Runtime Exceptions. Easy.

Except that now, the debugger will break on every single exception thrown while your app is running. Not just exceptions in your code that you’re not handling, but exceptions in the framework too. These are perfectly normal, and are all handled, but they are being caught before any handling code is executed.

This is particularly annoying when doing WebClient operations, or using Isolated Storage. You often get exceptions thrown when using these features, which are always handled before your code even sees them, but the debugger catches them anyway and stops.

I knew there was a way around this, because I’d seen it on other installations of Visual Studio. This is what the Exceptions dialog could look like:

With this, the debugger will only break on exceptions that aren’t handled elsewhere in your app. Which is what you usually want. I knew this option existed, but my Bing-Fu failed me, and I couldn’t find how to enable it. (Partly because I couldn’t remember what the extra column was called – if you search for user-unhandled you can find the answer).

You enable it in the Tools->Options dialog, in the Debugging section:

Just check ‘Enable Just My Code (Managed only)’ and magically, the Debug->Exceptions dialog will light up with the User-unhandled column.

I wish I knew this months ago.