No code run after accessing arrays/lists

Question

I am literally stumped on this one...

When running my code, the program just... doesn't run the rest of the code after I attempt to do anything with arrays or lists within in form load event, here's my code:

Public Shared alerts As String()

Private Sub Popup_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
    Me.Location = New Point(Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea.Width - Me.Width, Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea.Height - Me.Height)
    ' Check for alerts
    If My.Settings.hasadmin = False Then
        MsgBox("test1")
        pb_alert.Visible = True
        createAlert("Some functions require admin privileges.")
    End If
End Sub

Private Sub createAlert(ByVal msg As String)
    MsgBox("test2")
    updateAlerts()
    MsgBox("test5")
End Sub

Private Sub updateAlerts()
    MsgBox("test3")
    Dim length = alerts.Length
    MsgBox("test4")
End Sub

I don't know why this is happening...

Messageboxes coming up are: "test1" "test2" "test3" then nothing, because I accessed the alerts array?

I have no clue, help please!

ALSO I see no errors or compiling problems or ANYTHING!

The program continues after this, but it just won't bring up the other message boxes, which I want to replace with actual code of course.

Answer 1

The issue is that an exception is being thrown because alerts is Nothing.

The easy way around this is to initialize the string with a -1 size so that it is an empty array.

Public Shared alerts As String(-1)

The correct way is to test for Nothing before attempting to use it.

If alerts IsNot Nothing Then
  ' Do something with it

The other thing that you must do is add exception handling to the load event or add a AppDomain unhandled exception handler or handle the WinforsFormsApplicaBase UnhandledException event.

Load event:

Try
Catch theException As Exception
  Call MsgBox(theException.Message)
End Try