Best Practice for Exception Handling in a Windows Forms Application?

Question

I\'m currently in the process of writing my first Windows Forms application. I\'ve read a few C# books now so I\'ve got a relatively good understanding of what language feat

Answer 1

There is an excellent code CodeProject article here. Here are a couple of highlights:

• Plan for the worst*
• Check it early
• Don't trust external data
• The only reliable devices are: the video, the mouse and keyboard.
• Writes can fail, too
• Code Safely
• Don't throw new Exception()
• Don't put important exception information on the Message field
• Put a single catch (Exception ex) per thread
• Generic Exceptions caught should be published
• Log Exception.ToString(); never log only Exception.Message!
• Don't catch (Exception) more than once per thread
• Don't ever swallow exceptions
• Cleanup code should be put in finally blocks
• Use "using" everywhere
• Don't return special values on error conditions
• Don't use exceptions to indicate absence of a resource
• Don't use exception handling as means of returning information from a method
• Use exceptions for errors that should not be ignored
• Don't clear the stack trace when re-throwing an exception
• Avoid changing exceptions without adding semantic value
• Exceptions should be marked [Serializable]
• When in doubt, don't Assert, throw an Exception
• Each exception class should have at least the three original constructors
• Be careful when using the AppDomain.UnhandledException event
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• Don't use Unstructured Error Handling (VB.Net)