--- title: "Another book of the month, and what's up with ApplicationException?" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/another-book-of-the-month-and-whats-up-with-applicationexcep.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/another-book-of-the-month-and-whats-up-with-applicationexcep.html" published: "2004-04-03T12:05:00" updated: "2004-04-03T12:05:00" tags: [".Net Original"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "OK. I have to admit that this book was a very close second to my Book of the month: .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1 , by Brad Abrams . I really like this quote from Brad about the book: I tried…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Another book of the month, and what's up with ApplicationException? By Roy Osherove April 3, 2004 In [.Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original) **Historical article** · Originally published April 3, 2004; technical details may be outdated. OK. I have to admit that this book was a very close second to my Book of the month: [.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol 1,](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321154894/iserializable-20) by [Brad Abrams](http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/). I really like this quote from Brad about the book: _I tried to maintain a very minium level of editorial discretion on the annotations. My goal was to get folks that were heavily involved in the design of the BCL to comment candidly from their point of view. There are no annotations that are wrong technically, but that does not mean they are all the Microsoft official position_ [Brad is also sharing stuff from the book on his blog](http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/category/4449.aspx). Very interesting. I'd say this book is a must if you want to deeply understand some of the reasons and logic (and sometimes mistakes) that went into creating the base class library of the .Net framework. I'm one of those who believes the deeper you are aware of what's underneath, the better you can deal with problems and understand why things happen, and thus deal with them more easily. **Now about ApplicationException** Actually, the first post Brad made about the book brought up a discussion about using the ApplicationException class in your application. [In short, Don't](http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/03/25/96251.aspx). Yep. It came as a surprise to me as well. All the MS examples out there use this and I've read in lots of places that this class should be used as your base exception class. But now comes Brad and turns the tables. The comments on that post are very interesting. Personally, I still don't understand how this discrepancy came to be. Anyone know? ## More in .Net Original [All posts in .Net Original](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net-original) - Apr 10, 2004 ### [The Regulator 2.0 is out](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/10/the-regulator-20-is-out.html) - Apr 5, 2004 ### [The next Regulator is gonna rock (with your help)](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/5/the-next-regulator-is-gonna-rock-with-your-help.html) - Apr 3, 2004 ### [Book of the month for April](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/book-of-the-month-for-april.html) - Apr 3, 2004 ### [From Java Generics to questioning assumptions](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/4/3/from-java-generics-to-questioning-assumptions.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/