I need to let this sink in… but interesting stuff. try/catch and filters

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Somebody posted a comment up my blog which contained something along the lines of  “and VB .NET does the clever try catch stuff that C# can’t” . That got parked at the back of my brain and I finally went off looking for what this was.

Turns out there was a great post on it back in February 2009 on the CLR team blog “Catch, Rethrow and Filters – Why should you care?” .

Turns out VB allows us to inspect an exception without affecting state and conditionally decide whether or not to handle the exception. Notice the use of the When keyword on the Catch:

    1:  Function ShouldCatch(ByVal exception As CustomBaseException) As Boolean

    2:          If TypeOf (exception) Is CustomDontWantToCatchException Then

    3:              Return False

    4:          Else

    5:              Return True

    6:          End If

    7:  End Function

    8:   

    9:  Sub Main()

   10:          Try

   11:              Foo()

   12:          Catch ex As CustomBaseException When ShouldCatch(ex) = True

   13:              Console.WriteLine("Caught exception!")

   14:          End Try

   15:  End Sub

There is also a sample using VB to help C# take advantage of Filters :-) https://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2008/12/08/exception-filter.aspx 

New to me… was it new to you?