Rudolf blog of all

I’ll start this post with a statement or answer that might seem controversial.

The answer is ‘NO’

Why? Let me explain. If your code has reached a state where an Exception has been thrown it means you have already missed something (possible) important that should have been addressed. Sure, throwing (excuse the pun) a ‘try… catch’ around every block of code is nice and all – and you should do it anyway (for other reasons) but it is no excuse for writing bad code.

More details

One reason I say these things I recently (re)discovered myself… again is that ‘Performance’ in an application can greatly be influenced by exceptions since the whole process of encountering/throwing an exception in code is a slow thing. When you have code that relies on catching an exception in order to handle an (possibly) expected condition of some variables it is a sign that you are doing it wrong… It may not be a big issue if the affected code is called only once in a blue moon but once it is in a section that is called repeatedly and is expected to perform at speed it becomes a huge issue.

Have a look at this code. It will run fine but and actually be usable but…

try
{
   SomeType tp = SomeObject.SomeVar;
}
catch // null reference exception or something expected the first time
{
  SomeObject = new SomeObjectType();
  ...
}

Now look at a better way

if (SomeObject == null)

SomeObject = new SomeObjectType();

SomeType tp = SomeObject.SomeVar;

...

This code will actually run faster and does not rely on an Exception to handle something that should be done right to start with.

Ok, there you have it…