Protecting from plugin crashes

[Benny_Lava]

Hello, I'm building a plugin system for a hardware communicator system. So a plugin is actually a device communicator and the core program has many plugins that communicate with devices and write something to the database. Now, I have solved many things, I have made a DevicePlugin interface and have dynamically loaded and instantiated the plugins, and it works. The only thing that is bothering me is plugin crashes, for some reasons a plugin can sometimes crash (throw an unexpected exception) and a single plugin can crash my entire system. So my question is is there some way to put the entire plugin assembly intoa try catch so when plugin crashes the core system remains intact. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[BobJanova]

Load each plugin into a separate AppDomain and set the AppDomain's UnhandledException handler. Also, unless plugins are starting threads that cause crashes, you can simply wrap a try/catch around the point where you call into the plugin. But if they're talking to devices they probably do.

[Benny_Lava]

Thank you I will try that.

[Rob Philpott]

To second what Bob says, AppDomains are great for plug-in architectures. As well as providing robust protection of the process if something goes wrong, you can also unload them and that's the only way to 'unplug' a plug-in (craziness aside).

Regards, Rob Philpott.