The execution stack keeps track of all the methods that are in execution at a given instant. A trace of the method calls is called a stack trace. The stack trace listing provides a way to follow the call stack to the line number in the method where the exception occurs.

The Exception.StackTrace property returns the frames of the call stack that originate at the location where the exception was thrown. You can obtain information about additional frames in the call stack by creating a new instance of the System.Diagnostics.StackTrace class and using its System.Diagnostics.StackTrace.ToString method.

The common language runtime (CLR) updates the stack trace whenever an exception is thrown in application code (by using the throw keyword). If the exception was rethrown in a method that is different than the method where it was originally thrown, the stack trace contains both the location in the method where the exception was originally thrown, and the location in the method where the exception was rethrown. If the exception is thrown, and later rethrown, in the same method, the stack trace only contains the location where the exception was rethrown and does not include the location where the exception was originally thrown.

The Exception.StackTrace property may not report as many method calls as expected because of code transformations, such as inlining, that occur during optimization.

Namespace: System
Assembly: mscorlib (in mscorlib.dll)
Assembly Versions: 1.0.5000.0, 2.0.0.0, 4.0.0.0