What are Exceptions?

Introduction

Exception Handling is the main feature of OOP Concepts.

Before going to know about this Exception Handling, we should know what is an Exception?.

An exception is a runtime error that occurs while executing the program. Due to this, our system may hang or something may happen to it.

Explanation

Code that detects an error condition is said to throw an exception and code that handles the error is said to catch the exception. An exception in C# is an object that encapsulates various pieces of information about the error that occurred, such as the stack trace at the point of the exception and a descriptive error message.

All exception objects are instantiations of the System.Exception class or a child class of it.

Programmers may also define their own class inheriting from System.Exception or some other appropriate exception class from the .NET Framework.

Code Definitions for Exception Handling

• try/catch - Do something and catch an error, if it should occur.

• try/catch/finally - Do something and catch an error if it should occur, but always do the finally.

• try/finally - Do something, but always do the finally. Statements in the finally block are executed once control leaves the try statement.

Types

Exceptions are caught in the order from most specific to least specific. So for example, if you try and access a file that does not exist, the CLR would look for exception handlers in the following order:

• FileNotFoundException
• IOException (base class of FileNotFoundException)
• SystemException (base class of IOException)
• Exception (base class of SystemException)

If the exception being thrown does not derive from or is not in the list of exceptions to catch, it is thrown up the call stack.

You’ve got an introduction of what exceptions are - now let’s move onto their syntax and examples!