Pecunia's Place

Today, while improving the error handling of an application at work, I came upon a rather interesting piece of (C#) code. The application is a Windows service used for scheduling “plugins” that process documents or generate them and whatnot. Anyway, if a fatal error has occurred during the execution of a plugin, the following bit of code is executed after logging the event to a text file:

// dt = timestamp of error
// id = origin of the error
// text = error message
// Always send email in following case
if (type == SchedulerInfoType.FatalError)
{
  Mailer mailer = new Mailer();
  try
  {
    mailer.SendEmail(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["BugEmailAddress"],
      "scheduler@xxxxxx.xxx",
      "A fatal error has occurred " + dt.ToString(),
      String.Format(dt.ToString() + "-" + type.ToString() +
        "-" + id + "-" + text ),
      MailFormat.Html,
      MailPriority.Normal );
  }
  catch(Exception ex)
  {
    mailer.SendEmail(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["BugEmailAddress"],
      "scheduler@xxxxxx.xxx",
      "An error occurred while sending the error email " + dt.ToString(),
      String.Format(dt.ToString() + "-" + id + "-" + text + "\r\n") + 
      String.Format(ex.Message)
      , MailFormat.Html,
      MailPriority.Normal);
  }
}

Also note that the use of String.Format is rather superfluous in this case as there’s nothing to format…