Hi

I am wondering when you use a using statement on say a stream Reader or any other stream do you need to surround with a try/catch statement? Or does the using statement take care of this?

Also how about if you use the File Stream. I know this is quite different then the other streams. So do you need to put this in a try/catch or a using statement?

The using statement is basically just a wrapper that does the same thing as a try...finally block. What it actually does in the finally block I'm not sure, but I think it calls the object's Dispose() method. Based on that and what the implementation of the Dispose method is on the object you are "using" you can decided whether or not to wrap it.

One recommendation: don't wrap code in try...catch if you aren't planning on doing something constructive in the catch. I have seen people wrap everything, everywhere in try...catch blocks only to simply rethrow the original exception. That is pointless. Just let the exception bubble up. It will be much easier to trouble shoot and debug if you see the line of code that threw the original and meaningful exception than to just see the error message on the line "throw ex;".

-Peter
compiledthoughts.com

Peter has good advice here about not having empty catch blocks. My own choice is to return some kind of flag value from the routine that signals success (e.g., true) or failure (false) for the reader method. Also, it's generally not a good idea to put message box calls in the catch at this level. Message boxes are really part of the user interface and belong in the UI code. Use the return value from the reader call to decide what to do next.

Dr. Purdum


Jack Purdum, Ph.D.
Author: Beginning C# 3.0: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming (and 14 other programming texts)