C# Cookbook

Chapter 5. Exception Handling

This chapter contains recipes covering the exception handling mechanism, including the try, catch, and finally blocks. Along with these recipes are others covering the mechanisms used to throw exceptions manually from within your code. The final types of recipes include those dealing with the Exception classes, their uses, and subclassing them to create new types of exceptions.

Often the design and implementation of exception handling is performed later in the development cycle. But with the power and complexities of C# exception handling, you need to plan and even implement your exception handling scheme much earlier in the development cycle. Doing so will increase the reliability and robustness of your code while minimizing the impact of adding exception handling after most or all of the application is coded.

Exception handling in C# is very flexible. It allows you to choose a fine- or coarse-grained approach to error handling and any level between. This means that you can add exception handling around any individual line of code (the fine-grained approach), around a method that calls many other methods (the coarse-grained approach), or use a mix of the two. When using a fine-grained approach, you can intercept specific exceptions that might be thrown from just a few lines of code. The following method sets an object’s property to a numeric value using fine-grained exception handling:

protected void SetValue(object value) { try { myObj.Property1 ...