Security for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Exception Handling

The safest bet is to assume you can’t detect and handle every unexpected circumstance and that exceptions will inevitably occur. When an exception occurs, you should follow a standard series of steps—basic do’s and don’ts—to handle the exception. Here is what your system should and shouldn’t do when designing your application to cope with exceptions:

• DO write Try...Catch or On Error GoTo exception handling on all database interactions. Pay special attention to where the database is being accessed for the first time—because if there is a network outage or a bad file path to the database, this is where it will be first detected.

• DO report an error to the user explaining briefly what went wrong and what she should do next. Examples ...