Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - Errors: Preventing and Handling Them

This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning. The Complete Table of Contents for this course can be found on the first page of part 1: A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.

The philosophy of error handling in programming

"A stitch in time saves nine."

"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

"Well begun is half done."

Keep these well worn proverbs in mind to write code with great error prevention and handling. If you're writing a little utility that you'll only use on your own PC (such as our personal Signature Block program), clearing up a program crash due to some unforseen error isn't catastophic. But if the bug is in a DLL that has been distributed to a hundred branch offices, fixing a relatively simple problem could cost more than writing the program in the first place.

So error prevention and error handling is a priority subject for most software. That's why techniques for doing this have been seriously upgraded in VB.NET. We take a look at the .NET error handling way on the next page.