Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Finally Blocks

Much of this chapter has focused on how to write Try statements that contain Catch blocks. As you know, a Catch block is a piece of code that executes conditionally when things go wrong. A Try statement can also contain another construct known as a Finally block:

Try
  '*** Try block
Finally
  '*** Finally block
End Try

Unlike a Catch block, a Finally block doesn't execute conditionally when things go wrong. Rather, it executes unconditionally regardless of whether the Try block experiences an exception. In other words, the code within a Finally block executes in all situations.

A Finally block serves a different purpose than a Catch block. Because its code always executes, a Finally block is a great place for cleaning up and releasing ...