Catching specific vs. generic exceptions in c#

Question

This question comes from a code analysis run against an object I\'ve created. The analysis says that I should catch a more specific exception type than just the basic Except

Answer 1

You should read a general paper or google "Structured Exception Handling" and get a better big picture of what this topic is all about, but in general, catching every exception is considered bad practice because you have no idea what the exception was (Memory fault, out of memory error, Disk failure, etc.).

And for many unknown/unexpected exceptions, you should not be allowing the application to continue. In general, you "catch" and handle only those exceptions toy have determined, as a resutl of an analysis of the method you are coding the catch clause for, that that method can in fact create, and that you can do something about. The only time you should catch all expcetoins (catch Exception x) is to do something like logging it, in which case you should immediately rethrow the same exception (whatever it was) so that it can bubble up the stack to some general "Unhandled Exception Handler" which can display an appropriate message to the user and then cause the application to terminate.