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

Why would they fail? If it's because of something the caller has done (i.e. the arguments provided) then throwing ArgumentException is entirely appropriate. A Try[...] method which avoids the exception is fine.

I think it's a good idea to provide the version which throws an exception though, so that callers who expect that they will always provide good data will receive a suitably strong message (i.e. an exception) if they're ever wrong.