7.2. The Role of .NET Exception Handling

Prior to .NET, error handling under the Windows operating system was a confused mishmash of techniques. Many programmers rolled their own error-handling logic within the context of a given application. For example, a development team could define a set of numerical constants that represented known error conditions, and make use of them as method return values. By way of an example, consider the following partial C code:

/* A very C-style error trapping mechanism. */ #define E_FILENOTFOUND 1000 int SomeFunction() { // Assume something happens in this function // that causes the following return value. return E_FILENOTFOUND; } void main() { int retVal = SomeFunction(); if(retVal == E_FILENOTFOUND) printf("Cannot ...

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