Why use Finally in Try … Catch

Question

I see that the Finally in Try .. Catch will always execute after any parts of the execution of the try catch block.

Is it any different to

Answer 1

The Finally block will execute regardless of if the function exits because of an exception. (there are some exceptions to this rule, see this stackoverflow question for more info).

For example:

Try
    'Do something
Catch ex As Exception
    if 'Some Condition
       throw ex
    else
       'Handle exception
Finally
    'Do cleanup
End Try

In this case the Finally block will still be executed even though you may throw an exception out of the function.

This is a good practice to get into because it ensures that your cleanup code always executes. Of course using the Resoource Acquisition Is Initialization idiom is a much cleaner way of ensuring that resources get cleaned up, but I'm not versed enough in VB.net to know if this is possible to do.