C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

Appendix O Useful Exception Classes

When your program throws an exception, you can use a try-catch-finally block to catch the exception and examine it to determine its class. When you want to throw your own exception, however, you must know what exception classes are available so that you can pick the best one to throw. The following sections describe some of the most useful classes for throwing exceptions.

Standard Exception Classes

The following table lists some of the most useful exception classes in C#. If possible you should use one of these standard classes when you need to throw an exception.

Class	Purpose
AmbiguousMatchException	The program could not figure out which overloaded object method to use.
ArgumentException	An argument is invalid.
ArgumentNullException	An argument that cannot be null has the value null.
ArgumentOutOfRangeException	An argument is out of its allowed range.
ArithmeticException	An arithmetic, casting, or conversion operation has occurred.
ArrayTypeMismatchException	The program tried to store the wrong type of item in an array.
ConfigurationException	A configuration setting is invalid.
ConstraintException	A data operation violates a database constraint.
DataException	The ancestor class for ADO.NET exception classes.
DirectoryNotFoundException	A needed directory is missing.
DivideByZeroException	The program tried to divide by zero.
DuplicateNameException	An ADO.NET operation encountered a duplicate name. For example, it tried to create two tables ...