“Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” error (mscorlib)

Question

I have a website developed in ASP.Net 2.0 that is throwing the error

"Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation" 

in the production environment. It was not throwing this error in development.

The source is 'mscorlib', and the stack trace says the error at

System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast.

The only thing I've changed since my last upload to production is that I've started using Membership controls (Login, LoginView), and have added a few more stored procedures and tables, etc. The membership depends upon a custom provider I've written.

Anybody have a clue why this could be happening?

Answer 1

I'd suggest checking for an inner exception. If there isn't one, check your logs for the exception that occurred immediately prior to this one.

This isn't a web-specific exception, I've also encountered it in desktop-app development. In short, what's happening is that the thread receiving this exception is running some asynchronous code (via Invoke(), e.g.) and that code that's being run asynchronously is exploding with an exception. This target invocation exception is the aftermath of that failure.

If you haven't already, place some sort of exception logging wrapper around the asynchronous callbacks that are being invoked when you trigger this error. Event handlers, for instance. That ought to help you track down the problem.

Good luck!

Answer 2

This can happen when invoking a method that doesn't exist.

Answer 3

I know its kind of odd but I experienced this error for a c# application and finally I found out the problem is the Icon of the form! when I changed it everything just worked fine.

I should say that I had this error just in XP not in 7 or 8 .

Answer 4

' Get the your application's application domain.
Dim currentDomain As AppDomain = AppDomain.CurrentDomain 

' Define a handler for unhandled exceptions.
AddHandler currentDomain.UnhandledException, AddressOf MYExHandler 

' Define a handler for unhandled exceptions for threads behind forms.
AddHandler Application.ThreadException, AddressOf MYThreadHandler 

Private Sub MYExnHandler(ByVal sender As Object, _
ByVal e As UnhandledExceptionEventArgs) 
Dim EX As Exception 
EX = e.ExceptionObject 
Console.WriteLine(EX.StackTrace) 
End Sub 

Private Sub MYThreadHandler(ByVal sender As Object, _
ByVal e As Threading.ThreadExceptionEventArgs) 
Console.WriteLine(e.Exception.StackTrace) 
End Sub

' This code will throw an exception and will be caught.  
Dim X as Integer = 5
X = X / 0 'throws exception will be caught by subs below

Answer 5

I just had this issue from a namespace mismatch. My XAML file was getting ported over and it had a different namespace from that in the code behind file.

Answer 6

This is may have 2 reasons

1.I found the connection string error in my web.config file i had changed the connection string and its working.

2. Connection string is proper then check with the control panel>services> SQL Server Browser > start or not

Answer 7

Got same error, solved changing target platform from "Mixed Platforms" to "Any CPU"

Answer 8

This error occurs to me due to I have not set my Project as StartUp Project

When I set my current project to Set As Start-Up Project then it gone.

Answer 9

Encounter the same error when tried to connect to SQLServer2017 through Management Studio 2014

The reason was backward compatibility

So I just downloaded the Management Studio 2017 and tried to connect to SQLServer2017.

Problem Solve!!

Answer 10

In my case, this happened due to choosing the option to publish as a single file in VS (.NET 5 console app), once I changed it to publish normally the exception was gone.

Answer 11

I got this error after I tried to add a new controller in the Controller folder but the connection string was placed inside the entityFramework tag in Web.config file.