How to Count The Number of General Exceptions (C#) using PowerShell to Adapter in Jenkins Build Server?

Why are catching any general exceptions bad? They are just to suppress run time errors which may cause some more serious and worse errors later.

try {

} catch (Exception) {
  // this is bad exception handling, which just hides errors.
}

The total number of general-exceptions should be as small as possible. It could be and indicator of the code/software quality. To record/monitor this number along the builds on CI (Continuous Integration) servers e.g. Jenkins, we can write a small script in Powershell to loop for all source code (e.g C#)

# replace this accordingly
$SolutionDir = "C:\Project"  
$files = Get-ChildItem "$SolutionDir" -filter "*.cs" -Recurse | Where-Object {!(($_.FullName -like "*esigner*.cs") -or ($_.FullName -like "*AssemblyInfo*.cs"))}
$cnt = 0

for ($i = 0; $i -lt $files.Count; $i++) {
    $filename = $files[$i].FullName
    if (Test-Path $filename) {        
        $content = (Get-Content $filename -Raw)
        if ($content.Length -gt 0) {
            $matches = [regex]::matches($content, "catch\s*\(\s*Exception[\w\s]*\)")
            $cnt = $cnt + $matches.Count
        }
    }
}

The variable $cnt contains the total number of general-exceptions in the project solution. The Where-Object command excludes the *Designer.cs and *AssemblyInfo.cs where these are generally do not contain exceptions (machine-generated). Filtering them out improves scanning speed.

The regex expression \s* matches zero or more white-spaces. [\w\s]* matches alphabetic characters or spaces. So this catches nearly all variants: e.g. catch(Exception) or catch (Exception ex) or catch ( Exception).

However, this does not catch the general exception in the following format:

try {

} catch {
  // this is bad exception handling, which just hides errors.
}

The exceptional case can be captured by using pattern: “catch\s*\{” and for the curl brace not on the same line, you could use “catch\s*$\s*\{“. Then to sum up these three situations, the regular expressions to match any general exceptions in C# is:

$pattern = "catch(\s*\(\s*Exception[\w\s]*\)|\s*$\s*\{|\s*\{)"

To plot this number on CI management pages in browser, you would need to install a plot plugin jenkis ci build server and write the numbers in either CSV, XML or properties format. Properties file is the easiest one.

YVALUE=2343
URL=https://helloacm.com

To write this in powershell, it is easy:

function WritePropertyFile($filename, $YVALUE, $URL) {
    $content = "`r`nYVALUE=" + $YVALUE.Trim() + "`r`n" + "URL=" + $URL.Trim() + "`r`n"
    $content | Out-File -Encoding ascii -Force $filename.Trim()
}

WritePropertyFile "general-exceptions.txt"  $cnt "https://helloacm.com"

general-exceptions-build-server-jenkins-continuous-server

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