Nick has a great article about exception handling.
A couple things caught my attention (I'll explain why later):
Don’t Eat Exceptions
Let Your Users See Exception Messages
Ok, why did these catch my attention? Last week, I installed the ASP.NET Forums. Well...let me back up...I installed the version of the forums that WebHost4Life (a great host, BTW) has listed in the '.NET Add-Ins' section of the Control Panel. I had the forums setup and running, but for some reason, none of my testers were receiving the email with their password. Hmmm...what could the problem be? I downloaded the main assembly for the forums and opened it Reflector. Check out the code from the 'SendEmail' method:
try {
SmtpMail.Send(message1);
} catch (Exception) {
return false;
}
WTF? Thanks guys. :-\ That's helpful. At the very least, log the damn exception somewhere.
I gave up on that particular release of the forums and installed the latest code from CommunityServer.org. This cut of the code is fantastic. It's extremely simple to set-up and configure (for the most part).
Speaking of Reflector, I installed the Reflector.Graph add-in. All I can say is “Wow”.