1. At a computer system including at least one processor and a memory, in a computer networking environment including a plurality of computing systems, a computer-implemented method for handling errors in a distributed software application, the method comprising: an act of instantiating a distributed application, wherein the distributed application is configured for execution on a plurality of computer systems; an act of determining that an exception has occurred during the execution of the distributed application on at least one of the plurality of computer systems; an act of translating the exception that occurred during distributed execution in a distributed environment into a serial exception that appears to have occurred during serial execution in a serial execution environment; and an act of presenting the translated serial exception to an application developer along with one or more portions of exception data.