Never mind, I figured it out. It is truly the exception "object reference not set..." I am testing my Try Catch statement with several different exception types. In this particular case, my database connection string was incorrect.
However, if I try to use
Catch mysqlex as type MySqlException
then it does not go to the catch but stops at the Try statement where it tries to open the connection. If I specify the type as MySqlException then why doesn't it fall to the catch? I have used this type of Catch before in C# code, but instead of MySqlException it was the SQLException handling type.
Thoughts?