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

Another alternative is to throw an exception. However, you generally only want to throw exceptions in "exceptional cases".

If the failure cases are common (and not exceptional), then you've already listed out your two options. EDIT: There may be a convention in your project as how to handle such non-exceptional cases (whether one should return success or the object). If there is no existing convention, then I agree with lucasbfr and suggest you return success (which agrees with how TryParse(...) is designed).