Debug.Assert vs Exceptions

Question

Surprisingly I was only able to find one previous question on SO about this subject, and I\'d just like to get the community \"Vote of Confidence\" (or not!) on my approach.

Answer 1

I would say: use an exception if the bug is in someone else's code, or in code in a different subsystem (whether you wrote it or not). Also use an exception if there is an error in data that came from an external source such as a file.

Sometimes, you don't know whether the data came from an external source or not. If security is important and there's any possibility that you're dealing with external data that has not been verified correct, use an exception. If security is not important then I would use performance as a tiebreaker: might this code be executed in a tight loop? If so consider using an assert, as you'll get better performance in a Release build. Otherwise, use an exception.