Finding out what exceptions a method might throw in C#

Question

Is there any way to find out what exceptions might be thrown by any method in .NET code? Ideally I want to see what might be thrown and choose which ones I want to handle. I

Answer 1

After reading another article about this on StackOverflow, I built on top of that other answer to write a tool to do this, you can get the source code from GitHub here:

Exception Reflector

you can also read more here:

http://steves-rv-travels.com/archives/167

Answer 2

I think that Exception hunter can provide this information however it costs money...

Answer 3

.NET does not have enforced ("checked") exceptions like java. The intellisense might show this information, if the developer has added a /// <exception.../> block - but ultimately more exceptions can happen than you expect (OutOfMemoryException, ThreadAbortException, TypeLoadException, etc can all happen fairly unpredictably).

In general, you should have an idea of what things are likely to go wrong, and which ones you can actually do something useful about. In most cases, the correct behaviour is to let the exception bubble up (just running any "finally" code to release resources).

Eric Lippert has a good blog on this subject here.

Answer 4

As long as you're using BCL classes, they are all completely documented and Intellisense therefore displays any exception a method can throw. Other than that (and reading the docs), there is no way, I think.