Removing excessive try-catch blocks

Question

I'm refactoring a medium-sized WinForms application written by other developers and almost every method of every class is surrounded by a try-catch block. 99% of the time these catch blocks only log exceptions or cleanup resources and return error status.

I think it is obvious that this application lacks proper exception-handling mechanism and I'm planning to remove most try-catch blocks.

Is there any downside of doing so? How would you do this? I'm planning to:

To log exceptions appropriately and prevent them from propagating to the user, have an Application.ThreadException handler
For cases where there's a resource that needs cleanup, leave the try-catch block as it is

Update: Using using or try-finally blocks is a better way. Thanks for the responses.

In methods that "return-false-on-error", let the exception propagate and catch it in the caller instead

Any corrections/suggestions are welcome.

Edit: In the 3rd item, with "return-false-on-error" I meant methods like this:

bool MethodThatDoesSomething() {
    try {
       DoSomething(); // might throw IOException
    } catch(Exception e) {
       return false;
    }
}

I'd like to rewrite this as:

void MethodThatDoesSomething() {
   DoSomething(); // might throw IOException
}

// try-catch in the caller instead of checking MethodThatDoesSomething's return value
try {
   MethodThatDoesSomething()
} catch(IOException e) {
   HandleException(e);
}

user_8765805 · Answer

we can remove try and catch by adding condition Like

 string emailAddresses = @"^([\w\.\-]+)@([\w\-]+)((\.(\w){2,3})+)$";
        if (!Regex.IsMatch(Email, emailAddresses))
        {
            throw new UserFriendlyException($"E-mail Address Is not Valid");
        }**strong text**

Removing excessive try-catch blocks

8 Answers