Is it “bad” to use try-catch for flow control in .NET?

Question

I just found in a project:

try
{
    myLabel.Text = school.SchoolName;
}
catch
{
    myPanel.Visible = false;
}

I want to talk to the devel

Answer 1

You should not use exceptions for control flow simply because it is bad design. It doesn't make sense. Exceptions are for exceptional cases, not for normal flow. Performance probably won't be an issue in this situation because for most modern applications on modern hardware, you could throw exceptions all day long and the user wouldn't notice a performance hit. However, if this is a high performance application processing a lot of data or doing a lot of some sort of work, then yes, performance would be a concern.