ASP.NET MVC, throw HttpException vs return HttpStatusCodeResult?

Question

I am developing a RESTful service and I want to return 400 for all unsupported URLs.

My question is when should I choose method 1 over method 2 and vice-vers

Answer 1

Being in a DevOps team, we are all in the mind-set where throwing more hardware at something to get a slightly better result is always a good cause. So I'm intentionally ignoring the micro-cost of firing a .NET exception.

If you're leveraging a telemetry framework like ApplicationInsights then just returning the status code gives you nothing more than a "failed request". It doesn't give you any useful information that allows you to either compile or get any information on the "why" of the failed request.

Telemetry platforms expect and want you to throw, because error telemetry is usually around .NET exceptions, so if you're not throwing you're creating a problem for operations.

I actually landed here, because I'm in the process of writing a Roslyn analyser and CodeFix for a project where folks love to write try{} catch { return BadRequest("put_the_reason_here"); } and neither DevOps or the Dev teams see nothing useful in the system telemetry in ApplicationInsights.