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The beauty of this approach is that developers now have a unified approach to error handling,

which is common to all languages targeting the .NET platform. Therefore, the way in which a C#

programmer handles errors is syntactically similar to that of a VB .NET programmer, and a C++ pro-

grammer using managed extensions. As an added bonus, the syntax used to throw and catch

exceptions across assemblies and machine boundaries is identical.

Another bonus of .NET exceptions is the fact that rather than receiving a cryptic numerical

value that identifies the problem at hand, exceptions are objects that contain a human-readable

description of the problem, as well as a detailed snapshot of the call stack that triggered the excep-

tion in the first place. Furthermore, you are able to provide the end user with help link information

that points the user to a URL that provides detailed information regarding the error at hand as well

as custom programmer-defined data.