excpetion handling could be easy

We have been doing a major refactoring in our project trying to get rid of the legacy exception handling. As we went through our code we had some good laughs (we shouldn't have laughed as we still have to maintain that for a long time) and it was obvious that some developers had no clue about how to deal with exceptions or were too lazy to implement a more sophisticated handling. It seemed that some developers didn't miss any opportunity to get rid of that nasty exceptions. It seemed that we were fighting a .NET-bug called 'Exception'.

We also had a lot of discussons about exceptions, especially because we wanted to eliminate exception swallowing but not to change the user experience! Our product manager stated that it's better to have an obscure behaviour that the users knows than a new fancy error dialog that indicates problems at the root. (Users don't like fail fast!)

I didn't want to talk about that stuff but I have just come across some similar thoughts:

http://grabbagoft.blogspot.com/2007/11/stop-madness.html (see Try Catch Publish Swallow)
http://grabbagoft.blogspot.com/2007/06/swallowing-exceptions-is-hazardous-to.html
http://grabbagoft.blogspot.com/2007/06/re-throwing-exceptions.html