C# Try/Catch best practices

Question

I'm been reviewing some production code, and it seems there are a lot of Try/Catches, with some logic in the Try, but an empty Catch.

Is this a normal practice?

Could you not just use an If statement?

It seems odd to use the Try/Catch if you're not going to Catch anything.

Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9892137/windsor-pulling-transient-objects-from-the-container — Steven, Dec 10 '13 at 16:08
It's the equivalent of wrapping a blown fuse with tin foil - a sure way to electrocute someone and start a fire — Panagiotis Kanavos, Dec 10 '13 at 16:09

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 10 '13 at 16:10

A catchall statement that does nothing is an, unfortunately, common bad programming practice:

try
{
    DoSomething();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    //empty
}

It has humorously been called Pokémon Exception Handling (#2), because "you just Gotta Catch 'Em All".

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 10 '13 at 16:12

You are partially right.

An if-else though is no replacement for a try-catch. If Your code throws en exception ( willingly or unwillingly ), and You want either the code to proceed with processing, or just throw another exception upwards to caller,a try catch is the way to go. I do not see Your code in order to evaluate the rightness of try catch implementation. Could be helpful to show it.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 10 '13 at 16:12

1

I have a story about a guy, who was the best programmer in the development team. Nobody could beat him, because all of his codes never ever threw any exceptions for many years.

When he quit and others began to review his codes, the horror story began.

He used try and empty catch for every logic in his code.

The development team had to rewrite his entire code base.

answered Dec 10 '13 at 16:12

user2428668

31
2

2

Did you copy this from [last week's](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Exceptionally-Hard-to-Swallow.aspx) TheDailyWTF? – Panagiotis Kanavos Dec 10 '13 at 16:13

C# Try/Catch best practices

3 Answers3