Unhandled exceptions and background workers

Question

In our application we use several background workers which are executed using SERVICENAME__bgw.RunWorkerAsync() where SERVICENAME is one of several different background worker processes executed by different timers.

We recently saw this error message that was shown after an unhandled error bubbled up to the top of the call stack:

My question is, would that error message (which expects a click by a user) hang the entire application, or just the process that started it?

In other words, would all the other concurrent background workers always wait for user input before continuing, or would they carry on because they were not in the same thread?

Answer 1

The other threads will carry on. Only the thread used by the BackgroundWorker will crash.

An unhandled exception will be thrown. Since there is no exception handling in the event handler, it will get caught by the CLR as a last resort. This will not influence other threads.