Exception Handling in C#: Multple Try/Catches vs. One

Question

Is it good practice to have more than one try{} catch{} statement per method?

Answer 1

In my point of view it is good practice to have each method handle only a single task. As such you'll rarely need to have multiple try/catch blocks within a single method. However, I don't see any problems with it.

As Lisa pointed out you should catch specific exceptions and only catch the exceptions the method can actually handle.

Answer 2

If you know the type of Exceptions that could occur beforehand, you can have a single try and catch each of those exceptions, should you want to handle them differently. For example:

try
{
    // a bunch of risky code
}
catch (SpecificException1 ex1)
{
     // handle Specific Exception 1
}
catch (SpecificException2 ex2)
{
     // handle Specific Exception 2
}
catch (SpecificException3 ex3)
{
     // handle Specific Exception 3
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
     // handle an exception that isn't specific
}