[I wrote this while at Devscovery]
When I FIRST learned about exceptions 3 years ago, I was told that exception
handling was for handling exceptional situations. Jeffrey tells us that this is
a myth and is just wrong. Exceptions are when a method cannot perform its
expected behavior. There may be many reasons for this. There are plenty of
exceptions to allow you to handle much of what comes along.
Of course, performance came into question since it more expensive to catch
and exception than to test for it. A good example of this is looking at catching
a DivedbyZeroException vs. testing for zero and not wasting the resources used
by the exception. This is a matter of balance. If the possibility of a zero
being passed in is a rarity, then the exception won't be hit very often, yet an
if statement would be hit 100% of the time.
Jeffrey is on a mission to get the word out on this because the myth has been
alive for way too long. I realize that based on this myth, I do more error
handling than exception handling in my code. Of course, this is especially
important for component developers, who may not know how their components are
being used down the road.
Of course, I learned a lot more than just this about exception handling. I
won't be able to look at my old code in the same way again and will probably end
up going through and making some serious revisions.
I have been at Devscovery for two
days now and am learning so much. I am jumping around into different tracks and
getting a fantastic smorgasbord of information. It would be nice to just have
every session lined end to end and attend them all. Or just have them zap it all
into our brains. Like any conference, picking and choosing is always hard. But
having to constantly choose between deep internals with Richter, serious asp.net
with Jeff Prosise, hard core debugging with John Robbins and the many other
great topics and Wintellect presenters is
really just a big pain in the butt.
Sara Faatz has done an amazing job of putting together a top-notch and
intimate conference. Sara is also our marketing guru for INETA and her
contributions there are beyond amazing.