VB.NET Language in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Name

Err.Description Property

Class

Microsoft.VisualBasic.ErrObject

Syntax

To set the property:

Err.Description = string

To return the property value:

                  string = Err.Description

string (required; String)

Any string expression

Description

A read/write property containing a short string describing a runtime error

Rules at a Glance

• When a runtime error occurs, the Description property is automatically assigned the standard description of the error.

• For application-defined errors, you must assign a string expression to the Description property, or the error will not have an accompanying textual message.

• You can override the standard description by assigning your own description to the Err object for both VB errors and application-defined errors.

Programming Tips and Gotchas

• If an error occurs within a class module, an ActiveX DLL, or an EXE — regardless of whether it is running in or out of your application’s process space — no error information from the component will be available to your application unless you explicitly pass back an error code as part of the error-handling routine within the component. This is done using the Err.Raise method, which allows you to raise an error on the client, passing custom arguments for Number, Source, and Description.

• If you raise an error with the Err.Raise method and do not set the Description property, the Description property will be automatically set to “Application- efined or Object-Defined Error.”

• You can also pass the Err.Description to a logging ...