Would you ever NOT catch an exception, or throw an exception that won't be caught?

Question

I\'ve dealt with instances where I would throw/rethrow an exception knowing that the code surrounding it would catch the specific exception. But is there any time you would

Answer 1

Generally, and certainly in early iterations of your application, don't catch the exception. More often than not, the recovery from an exception will require a business rule of some sort, and, more often than not, those business rules are not defined for you. If you "handle" the exception instead of letting the application die then you will most likely be inventing business rules for your customer. Not good.

The general pattern of catching every exception just for the sake of catching it has caused me more headaches than I can count. It usually happens that someone puts some sort of generic exception handling code throughout the application, which inevitably ends up hiding a bug or creating some behavior that is unwanted. (incidentally, catching and then not rethrowing is even worse.)

So, I'd suggest that you ask instead: "When should I catch an exception?"