Reinventing the wheel, badly

A few years ago, I inherited a VB.NET application in which every method (many of which were four hundred lines long, copied and pasted all over the place, and peppered with vague sounding variable names such as blnRunIf and blnRunElse) contained this boilerplate code:

Sub MyMethod()
    Try
        '
        ' ** snip ** '
        '
    Catch ex As Exception
        Throw New Exception ("MyClass.MyMethod::" + ex.Message)
    End Try
End Sub

Those who do not understand Exception.StackTrace are doomed to reinvent it, badly.

Posted at 08:00 on 11 May 2009.