What are industry standard best practices for implementing custom exceptions in C#?

What are industry standard best practices for implementing custom exceptions in C#?

I have checked Google and there's a great number of recommendations, however I don't know which ones hold more credibility.

If anybody has any links to authoritative articles, that would also be helpful.

Solution 1:

The standard for creating custom exceptions is to derive from Exception. You can then introduce your own properties/methods and overloaded constructors (if applicable).

Here is a basic example of a custom ConnectionFailedException which takes in an extra parameter which is specific to the type of exception.

[Serializable]
public class ConnectionFailedException : Exception
{
    public ConnectionFailedException(string message, string connectionString)
        : base(message)
    {
        ConnectionString = connectionString;
    }

    public string ConnectionString { get; private set; }
}

In the application this could be used in scenarios where the application is attempting to connect to a database e.g.

try
{
    ConnectToDb(AConnString);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw new ConnectionFailedException(ex.Message, AConnString);
}

It's up to you to then handle the ConnectionFailedException at a higher level (if applicable)

Also have a look at Designing Custom Exceptions and Custom Exceptions

Solution 2:

Here is the code to create a custom exception:

using System;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;

namespace YourNamespaceHere
{
    [Serializable()]
    public class YourCustomException : Exception, ISerializable
    {
        public YourCustomException() : base() { }
        public YourCustomException(string message) : base(message) { }
        public YourCustomException(string message, System.Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
        public YourCustomException(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context) { }
    }
}

See also: http://www.capprime.com/software_development_weblog/2005/06/16/CreatingACustomExceptionClassInC.aspx

Solution 3:

I assume you are looking for exception handling practices. So have look on following articles,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229014.aspx //gives overall ideas about exceptions including custom exceptions

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaredpar/archive/2008/10/20/custom-exceptions-when-should-you-create-them.aspx //