Understanding Exceptions and Their Messages

When errors happen, an exception is raised or thrown. There are three layers at which you may trap and deal with an exception: in a try...catch...finally block, at the Page level, or at the Application level. The first two happen right inside a page's code, and code for application events is kept inside global.asax.

The Exception object contains information about the error, and as the event bubbles up through the layers, it is wrapped in further detail. In rough terms, the Application_Error exception contains the Page_Error exception, which expands on the base Exception, which triggered the bubbling in the first place.