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

Exceptions do incur runtime overhead, but it's probably negligible here. There will be a difference running in the debugger, but the built binaries should run at pretty much the same speed.

Tell your developer that any chimp can make code the machine can read. Good code is written for human beings, not machines. If a null exception is the only thing you're worried about, then it's probably a bug in the user's code -- noone should ever try to assign null to anything that way. Use an Assert() statement instead.