ThrowIfFailed

When programming COM APIs like Direct3D, it is important to always check the HRESULT return value for success or failure. This can be done using the SUCCEEDED or FAILED macros, but can get tedious when making lots of calls especially for proper cleanup on exit of every function.

hr = device->CreateTexture2D(&depthStencilDesc, nullptr, &depthStencil));
if (FAILED(hr))
{
    // Clean up for partial success before here
    return hr; // Must keep passing the error code back all the way to the main loop
}

Not all Direct3D functions return HRESULT. Many of them return void because they can't fail, fail silently, or the failure will be reported on the next Present.

Fast Fail

A simple way to handle always fatal errors is to use C++ exceptions (/EHsc is the default for Visual C++, and has no code impact for x64 native, ARM, or ARM64 platforms). The DX::ThrowIfFailed helper can be used whenever a failure is fatal and should result in 'fast-fail' of the application.

DX::ThrowIfFailed(device->CreateTexture2D(&depthStencilDesc,
    nullptr, &depthStencil));

A "fast-fail" failure is an error case you never expect to happen in the real world, but if it does happen you want to make sure the process dies quickly so as to avoid 'hiding' the real bug, hardware failure, or other failure that your program just can't handle. In the case above, for example, you are assuming you aren't passing invalid parameters to the function (E_INVALIDARG) because you've tested it on a range of supported Direct3D feature level devices, and that you won't run out of memory (E_OUTOFMEMORY) because you scale your content appropriately.

Runtime error handling

Otherwise, traditional if FAILED(hr) or if SUCCEEDED(hr) patterns should be used to handle failures that the application can recover from (i.e. are not fatal). If you want to handle a specific HRESULT, then you might do something like:

HRESULT hr = device->CreateTexture2D(&depthStencilDesc,
    nullptr, &depthStencil);
if (hr == E_INVALIDARG)
{
    // Do something here in response to this specific error.
}
DX::ThrowIfFailed(hr);

For a case where you want to do the error-handling for an HRESULT yourself, be sure to use the SUCCEEDED or FAILED macro:

HRESULT hr = device->CreateTexture2D(&depthStencilDesc,
    nullptr, &depthStencil);
if (FAILED(hr))
    // Error handling

The legacy DXUT framework makes use of macros like V and V_RETURN as a pattern for dealing with HRESULT values, but these make assumptions about the surrounding functions and are really only suited to sample development.

Basic version

The ThrowIfFailed helper is not part of the DirectX Tool Kit; it's declared in some global header in your application. The C++ DirectX templates for Universal Windows Platform apps, Windows 8.x Store, Windows phone 8.x, Xbox One, and the Direct3D Win32 Game templates all make use of the DX::ThrowIfFailed helper--you'll typically find it declared in the pch.h header.

#include <exception>

namespace DX
{
    inline void ThrowIfFailed(HRESULT hr)
    {
        if (FAILED(hr))
        {
            // Set a breakpoint on this line to catch DirectX API errors
            throw std::exception();
        }
    }
}

Enhancements

The templates all include the basic implementation above, but production use might want to utilize a slightly improved version as follows (which are included in the DeviceResources variants of the Direct3D Win32 Game templates).

#include <exception>

namespace DX
{
    // Helper class for COM exceptions
    class com_exception : public std::exception
    {
    public:
        com_exception(HRESULT hr) : result(hr) {}

        const char* what() const noexcept override
        {
            static char s_str[64] = {};
            sprintf_s(s_str, "Failure with HRESULT of %08X",
                static_cast<unsigned int>(result));
            return s_str;
        }

    private:
        HRESULT result;
    };

    // Helper utility converts D3D API failures into exceptions.
    inline void ThrowIfFailed(HRESULT hr)
    {
        if (FAILED(hr))
        {
            throw com_exception(hr);
        }
    }
}

Further reading

• C++ Exception Handling
• Managing Exceptions with the Debugger
• Error Handling in COM