Summary

Throwing an exception causes a significant performance hit. A single exception causes lots of runtime stack information to be loaded and processed, data that would not otherwise be loaded, and it takes a considerable amount of time. As pointed out in Chapter 4, use exceptions only to handle exceptional circumstances; APIs should provide mechanisms to check whether an exception will be thrown instead of forcing a particular API to be called in order to determine whether an exception will be thrown.

The next chapter introduces generics, a C# 2.0 feature that significantly enhances the code written in C# 1.0. In fact, it essentially deprecates any use of the System.Collections namespace, which was formerly used in nearly every project.