主要有两类异常:

1)系统异常(如数据库连接丢失)或 2)用户异常。(例如用户输入验证，“密码不正确”)

我发现创建自己的用户异常类很有帮助，当我想抛出一个用户错误时，我想要以不同的方式处理(即资源错误显示给用户)，然后我在我的主错误处理程序中所需要做的就是检查对象类型:

            If TypeName(ex) = "UserException" Then
               Display(ex.message)
            Else
               DisplayError("An unexpected error has occured, contact your help  desk")                   
               LogError(ex)
            End If

我个人的指导方针是:当发现当前代码块的基本假设为假时抛出异常。

例1:假设我有一个函数，它应该检查任意类，如果该类继承自List<>，则返回true。这个函数问一个问题:“这个对象是List的后代吗?”这个函数永远不会抛出异常，因为它的操作中没有灰色地带——每个单独的类要么继承了List<>，要么继承了List<>，所以答案总是“是”或“否”。

Example 2: say I have another function which examines a List<> and returns true if its length is more than 50, and false if the length is less. This function asks the question, "Does this list have more than 50 items?" But this question makes an assumption - it assumes that the object it is given is a list. If I hand it a NULL, then that assumption is false. In that case, if the function returns either true or false, then it is breaking its own rules. The function cannot return anything and claim that it answered the question correctly. So it doesn't return - it throws an exception.

这与“负载问题”逻辑谬误相当。每个函数都问一个问题。如果给出的输入使该问题成为谬误，则抛出异常。对于返回void的函数，这条线很难画出来，但底线是:如果函数对其输入的假设违反了，它应该抛出异常，而不是正常返回。

这个等式的另一方面是:如果你发现你的函数经常抛出异常，那么你可能需要改进它们的假设。

最终，决定取决于是使用异常处理更有助于处理此类应用程序级错误，还是通过您自己的机制(如返回状态代码)更有帮助。我不认为哪个更好有一个严格的规则，但我会考虑:

Who's calling your code? Is this a public API of some sort or an internal library? What language are you using? If it's Java, for example, then throwing a (checked) exception puts an explicit burden on your caller to handle this error condition in some way, as opposed to a return status which could be ignored. That could be good or bad. How are other error conditions in the same application handled? Callers won't want to deal with a module that handles errors in an idiosyncratic way unlike anything else in the system. How many things can go wrong with the routine in question, and how would they be handled differently? Consider the difference between a series of catch blocks that handle different errors and a switch on an error code. Do you have structured information about the error you need to return? Throwing an exception gives you a better place to put this information than just returning a status.

在决定异常是否合适时，需要考虑一些有用的事情:

what level of code you want to have run after the exception candidate occurs - that is, how many layers of the call stack should unwind. You generally want to handle an exception as close as possible to where it occurs. For username/password validation, you would normally handle failures in the same block of code, rather than letting an exception bubble up. So an exception is probably not appropriate. (OTOH, after three failed login attempts, control flow may shift elsewhere, and an exception may be appropriate here.) Is this event something you would want to see in an error log? Not every exception is written to an error log, but it's useful to ask whether this entry in an error log would be useful - i.e., you would try to do something about it, or would be the garbage you ignore.

以下是我的建议:

我不认为这总是一个抛出异常的好方法，因为它将花费更多的时间和内存来处理这样的异常。

在我看来，如果某些事情可以用“友好、礼貌”的方式处理(这意味着如果我们可以“通过使用if......或类似的东西来预测这样的错误)，我们应该避免使用“异常”，而只是返回一个像“false”这样的标志，用一个外部参数值告诉他/她详细的原因。

举个例子，我们可以这样创建一个类:

public class ValueReturnWithInfo<T>
{
   public T Value{get;private set;}
   public string errorMsg{get;private set;}
   public ValueReturnWithInfo(T value,string errmsg)
   {
      Value = value;
      errMsg = errmsg;
   }
}

我们可以使用这种“多值返回”类来代替错误，这似乎是处理异常问题的一种更好、更礼貌的方式。

但是，请注意，如果一些错误不能如此容易地用"if"......(例如FileIO异常)描述(这取决于您的编程经验)，则必须抛出异常。

我认为只有在无法摆脱当前状态时才应该抛出异常。例如，如果您正在分配内存，但没有任何内存可以分配。在您提到的情况下，您可以清楚地从这些状态中恢复，并相应地将错误代码返回给调用者。

You will see plenty of advice, including in answers to this question, that you should throw exceptions only in "exceptional" circumstances. That seems superficially reasonable, but is flawed advice, because it replaces one question ("when should I throw an exception") with another subjective question ("what is exceptional"). Instead, follow the advice of Herb Sutter (for C++, available in the Dr Dobbs article When and How to Use Exceptions, and also in his book with Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards): throw an exception if, and only if

没有满足先决条件(通常会出现以下情况之一 不可能的)或 替代方案将无法满足后置条件或 替代方案将无法保持不变式。

为什么这样更好呢?它不是用几个关于前置条件，后置条件和不变量的问题代替了这个问题吗?这是更好的几个相关的原因。

Preconditions, postconditions and invariants are design characteristics of our program (its internal API), whereas the decision to throw is an implementation detail. It forces us to bear in mind that we must consider the design and its implementation separately, and our job while implementing a method is to produce something that satisfies the design constraints. It forces us to think in terms of preconditions, postconditions and invariants, which are the only assumptions that callers of our method should make, and are expressed precisely, enabling loose coupling between the components of our program. That loose coupling then allows us to refactor the implementation, if necessary. The post-conditions and invariants are testable; it results in code that can be easily unit tested, because the post-conditions are predicates our unit-test code can check (assert). Thinking in terms of post-conditions naturally produces a design that has success as a post-condition, which is the natural style for using exceptions. The normal ("happy") execution path of your program is laid out linearly, with all the error handling code moved to the catch clauses.