What is Environment.FailFast?
How is it useful?
8 Answers
It is used to kill an application. It's a static method that will instantly kill an application without being caught by any exception blocks.
Environment.FastFail(String) can actually be a great debugging tool. For example, say you have an application that is just downright giving you some weird output. You have no idea why. You know it's wrong, but there are just no exceptions bubbling to the surface to help you out. Well, if you have access to Visual Studio 2005's Debug->Exceptions... menu item, you can actually tell Visual Studio to allow you to see those first chance exceptions. If you don't have that, however you can put Environment.FastFail(String) in an exception, and use deductive reasoning and process of elimination to find out where your problem in.
It's a way to immediately exit your application without throwing an exception.
Documentation is here.
Might be useful in some security or data-critical contexts.
Joe Duffy discusses failing fast and the discipline to make it useful, here.
http://joeduffyblog.com/2014/10/13/if-youre-going-to-fail-do-it-fast/
Essentially, he's saying that for programming bugs - i.e. unexpected errors that are the fault of the programmer and not the programme user or other inputs or situations that can be reasonable expected to be bad - then deciding to always fail fast for unexpected errors has been seen to improve code quality.
I think since its an optional team decision and discipline, use of this API in C# is rare since in reality we're all mostly writing LoB apps for 12 people in HR or an online shop at best.
So for us, we'd maybe use this when we want deny the consumer of our API the opportunity of making any further moves.
An unhandled exception that is thrown (or rethrown) within a Task won't take effect until the Task is garbage-collected, at some perhaps-random time later.
This method lets you crash the process now -- see this answer.
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