How to indicate that a method was unsuccessful

Question

I have several similar methods, say eg. CalculatePoint(...) and CalculateListOfPoints(...). Occasionally, they may not succeed, and need to indicate this to the caller. For

Answer 1

Personally, I think I'd use the same idea as TryParse() : using an out parameter to output the real value, and returning a boolean indicating whether the call was successful or not

public bool CalculatePoint(... out Point result);

I am not a fan of using exception for "normal" behaviors (if you expect the function not to work for some entries).