Removing excessive try-catch blocks

Question

I\'m refactoring a medium-sized WinForms application written by other developers and almost every method of every class is surrounded by a try-catch block. 99% of t

Answer 1

I think your strategy of removing try/catch block which just appear to do generic thoughtless logging is fine. Obviously leaving the cleanup code is necessary. However, I think more clarification is needed for your third point.

Return false on error methods are usually OK for things where exceptions are unavoidable, like a file operation in your example. Whereas I can see the benefit of removing exception handling code where it's just been put in thoughtlessly, I would consider carefully what benefit you get by pushing responsibility for handling an exception of this kind higher up in the call chain.

If the method is doing something very specific (it's not generic framework code), and you know which callers are using it, then I'd let it swallow the exception, leaving the callers free of exception handling duties. However, if it's something more generic and maybe more of a framework method, where you're not sure what code will be calling the method, I'd maybe let the exception propagate.