Best practices for catching and re-throwing .NET exceptions

Question

What are the best practices to consider when catching exceptions and re-throwing them? I want to make sure that the Exception object\'s InnerException

Answer 1

Nobody has explained the difference between ExceptionDispatchInfo.Capture( ex ).Throw() and a plain throw, so here it is. However, some people have noticed the problem with throw.

The complete way to rethrow a caught exception is to use ExceptionDispatchInfo.Capture( ex ).Throw() (only available from .Net 4.5).

Below there are the cases necessary to test this:

1.

void CallingMethod()
{
    //try
    {
        throw new Exception( "TEST" );
    }
    //catch
    {
    //    throw;
    }
}

2.

void CallingMethod()
{
    try
    {
        throw new Exception( "TEST" );
    }
    catch( Exception ex )
    {
        ExceptionDispatchInfo.Capture( ex ).Throw();
        throw; // So the compiler doesn't complain about methods which don't either return or throw.
    }
}

3.

void CallingMethod()
{
    try
    {
        throw new Exception( "TEST" );
    }
    catch
    {
        throw;
    }
}

4.

void CallingMethod()
{
    try
    {
        throw new Exception( "TEST" );
    }
    catch( Exception ex )
    {
        throw new Exception( "RETHROW", ex );
    }
}

Case 1 and case 2 will give you a stack trace where the source code line number for the CallingMethod method is the line number of the throw new Exception( "TEST" ) line.

However, case 3 will give you a stack trace where the source code line number for the CallingMethod method is the line number of the throw call. This means that if the throw new Exception( "TEST" ) line is surrounded by other operations, you have no idea at which line number the exception was actually thrown.

Case 4 is similar with case 2 because the line number of the original exception is preserved, but is not a real rethrow because it changes the type of the original exception.