The C# Programming Language, Third Edition

16. Exceptions

Exceptions in C# provide a structured, uniform, and type-safe way of handling both system-level and application-level error conditions. The exception mechanism in C# is quite similar to that of C++, with a few important differences:

•  In C#, all exceptions must be represented by an instance of a class type derived from System.Exception. In C++, any value of any type can be used to represent an exception.

•  In C#, a finally block (§8.10) can be used to write termination code that executes in both normal execution and exceptional conditions. Such code is difficult to write in C++ without duplicating code.

•  In C#, system-level exceptions such as overflow, divide-by-zero, and null dereferences have well-defined exception classes ...