Why is try {…} finally {…} good; try {…} catch{} bad?

Question

I have seen people say that it is bad form to use catch with no arguments, especially if that catch doesn\'t do anything:

StreamReader reader=new  StreamRead         


        

Answer 1

Well for one, it's bad practice to catch exceptions you don't bother to handle. Check out Chapter 5 about .Net Performance from Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability. Side note, you should probably be loading the stream inside the try block, that way, you can catch the pertinent exception if it fails. Creating the stream outside the try block defeats its purpose.