Should Guid.Empty Result in ArgumentException or ArgumentOutOfRangeException

Question

Imagine that you have a method with the following signature:

public void DoSomething(Guid id)

If Guid.Emtpy represents an illegal value, which Exception type would it be most appropriate to throw? ArgumentException or ArgumentOutOfRangeException?

I'm leaning slightly towards ArgumentException, since I don't think that all Guids except Guid.Empty is much of a range - it's a bit too inclusive: There is only one excluded member.

However, I am in no way determined that this should be the case, so I'd like to hear if anyone can provide arguments for one or the other?

I'm well aware that this is mainly a semantic discussion, but in the interest of good API design I'd still like to know whether there are clear cases for one or the other option.

Answer 1

I'd throw an ArgumentException. Its docs say:

The exception that is thrown when one of the arguments provided to a method is not valid.

which is exactly the scenario you describe. You want something along the lines of:

throw new ArgumentException("Guid.Empty is not a valid id", "id");