# Understanding User and Kernel Mode

**URL:** <https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/understanding-user-and-kernel-mode/405>\
**Category:** blog\
**Created:** [January 3, 2008, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/understanding-user-and-kernel-mode/405 "2008-01-03T00:00:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 68

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**Author:** ![Chris\_Nahr](https://discourse-cdn.codinghorror.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v2/letter/c/48db29/32.png) [@Chris\_Nahr](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/u/Chris_Nahr)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2008, 12:00am UTC](https://discourse.codinghorror.com/t/understanding-user-and-kernel-mode/405/68 "2008-01-05T00:00:00Z")

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Operative words being “probably take a trip through the OS kernel.”

Precisely. “Probably” does not mean “always”.

Nowhere in this article does he state that either Windows SEH or the exception models built on top of it (which by the way include both .NET _and_ Visual C++, as he explicitly says) will _always_ go into kernel mode, as you and others were implying.

“Probably” should refer to the _cause_ of the exception, or related processing, when an exception occurs in the context of I/O. I would be extremely surprised if an Int32.Parse exception did in fact transition to kernel mode.

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