Why must a type thrown or caught derive from System.Exception

Question

So just out of curiosity I wanted to see what was special about the exception class that allowed it to be used with the keyword Throw while a standard class is not.

Answer 1

One reason why every exception needs to have a universal base class is so you can catch every type of exception in a single catch block.

If I have this:

try
{
    ...
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
    // Handle somehow
}

That will catch ALL exceptions, and will allow me to display what it is (by using ex.Message).

If you could throw anything, then how would you have a catch that would catch everything and still give you access to the object thrown?

You could have this, which will catch absolutely everything:

try
{
    ...
}
catch
{
    // Handle somehow
}

But you have 'lost' the thing that was thrown.