jasonbock.net

"Exception Handling in .NET" - Status Update

Recently I blogged about how I'm so tired of seeing really bad exception handling practices in production code. The comments have been encouraging enough for me to put together a very rough outline of what I want in the book. It still needs fleshing out, but I'm about 90% ready to say "yes, I'm going to do this". I think I might call it "Investigating Exception Handling" as I already have three eBooks on my web site on Reflection, WinServices, and .NET languages (I have two others on serialization and threading but I never published them). Those three eBooks are really old and outdated...which makes me wonder if I should spend time updating some of those as well. If I would, though, I would think very hard about charging some money for the eBooks (just to get a little bit back for the effort I'd put into them), but I'd want to keep the cost very, very low.

Oh, and I found another "nugget" in the current code base that validated why an artifact like the eBook is needed:

try
{
    // interesting code goes here...
}
catch
{
    throw;
}

...sigh...

* Posted at 07.24.2008 09:09:21 AM (Last Update: 07.24.2008 05:07:50 PM) | 3 comments | Link | RSS *

Comments

# developer, from Chris at 07.24.2008 01:35:13 PM

One commenter on a post I made(http://panteravb.com/blog/posts/2007/9/14/try-catch-now-what.ashx) about the same topic indicated that the reason for the nugget you're showing above is to make debugging easier, you can set a breakpoint on that "throw;" line and find out when you have an exception.

In response i did a little silent movie on how to break on excpetion using visual studio, http://panteravb.com/demo/ctrl-alt-e.htm.

It might be worth mentioning the concept of breaking on exceptions in your ebook.

# Yep, that's on the list, from Jason Bock at 07.24.2008 01:45:26 PM

I already had that on my outline, but I like your vid, I'll probably include a link to that in the footnotes :)

# ebooks, from Eric at 07.24.2008 05:07:48 PM

I glanced through the WinServices ebook and it's mostly stuff I remember from a couple of years ago (it appears to be related to .NET 1.0?). I'd definitely pay for an updated book that covered whatever sort of changes/additions were made since .NET 1.0. You don't see a lot of coverage on creating Windows Services these days? A number of publishers like Wrox have smaller, focused ebooks for sale for < $10. I guess you don't really need a publisher for producing an ebook, but it might help with the marketing aspect (it's possibly they have more exposure than your blog readership?).

Examples:

http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0470259108.html