thread was being aborted

can it be that this demi-god of t-sql can also code and happens to know a thing or two about debugging? holy shit, how has some beautiful lady not yet scooped him up and made him hers by constantly giving him hot, hot lovin? i ask myself these questions often. i also ask myself who the hell thinks that choking a dude is a good way of saying 'nicely done', but that's a story for another time...

if you are using response.redirect(url) or server.transfer in your web application and receiving a "Thread was being aborted" error despite the fact that your application does absoluetely nothing explicitly with threading, you may be as confused as i was when this happened to me. i'll be the first to admit that, despite all those lovely Microsoft certification letters after my name, i'm far from an expert on page life cycles and the intricacies of what goes on behind the scenes when the application does something as seemingly simple as changing the page that is displayed to a user. here is what i found:

response.redirect and server.transfer both internally call response.end. response.end ends the current page execution, the Application_EndRequest event is fired and a ThreadAbortException is thrown (i'm unsure whether or not resonse.end throws the ThreadAbortException to immediately shift the page life cycle to Application_EndRequest of if the exception is thrown in the Application_EndRequest event). that code which follows response.end (and, therefore, response.redirect and server.transfer) is not executed.

you: "why not just wrap the page redirection in a try...catch block and catch the exception?"

a ThreadAbortException will be rethrown at the end of your catch block whether you like it or not. it will then execute everything in your ...finally block and then kill your current thread. if you feel like dealing with threads, you can call thread.resetabort in your catch block to continue executing your thread, but this discussion assumes you are not dealing with threading, so scratch that.

solution: it turns out this is actually a pretty easy fix. if you are using response.redirect(url), use the overloaded version response.redirect(url, false) instead. if you are using server.transfer, use server.execute.

works cited:
Microsft Help and Support
DotNetJunkies - In the line of Fire -- Shaunak Pandit
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation - ThreadAbortClass