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

The golden rule that have tried to stick to is handle the exception as close to the source as possible.

If you must re-throw an exception try to add to it, re-throwing a FileNotFoundException does not help much but throwing a ConfigurationFileNotFoundException will allow it to be captured and acted upon somewhere up the chain.

Another rule I try to follow is not to use try/catch as a form of program flow, so I do verify files/connections, ensure objects have been initiated, ect.. prior to using them. Try/catch should be for Exceptions, things you can not control.

As for an empty catch block, if you are doing anything of importance in the code that generated the exception you should re-throw the exception at a minimum. If there is no consequences of the code that threw the exception not running why did you write it in the first place.