Programming ASP.NET MVC 4

Chapter 16. Logging

Software bugs are a fact of life—no matter how much thought you put into your application’s architecture or how well you write your code, sooner or later you will experience issues.

In order to minimize the impact that these errors can have on your site, you need to treat error handling and logging just like you would treat any other important feature: by planning to put it into your project and your application design as early as possible.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the error handling, logging, and monitoring tools that you can use to help increase your application’s performance, and we’ll track down issues when they arise.

Error Handling in ASP.NET MVC

There are plenty of things that can go wrong when your application is busy processing an HTTP request. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC makes it relatively easy to handle all of these situations with ease.

Since ASP.NET MVC applications run on top of the core ASP.NET Framework, they have access to the same core framework capabilities as Web Forms applications, including the ability to set up a custom error page to handle specific status codes when they occur.

Let’s see how to deal with errors in your ASP.NET MVC web application by deliberately introducing an exception to the Ebuy reference application. To introduce the exception, open up the HomeController and add code to throw a new exception into the About controller action:

public ActionResult About()
{
      ViewBag.Message = "Your quintessential app description page." ...