I've been through a very similar situation when I had to deal with a terrible legacy Windows Forms code written by developers that clearly didn't know what they were doing.
First of all, you're not overacting. This is bad code. Like you said, the catch block should be about aborting and preparing to stop. It's not time to create objects (specially Panels). I can't even start explaining why this is bad.
That being said...
My first advice is: if it's not broken, don't touch it!
If your job is to maintain the code you have to do your best not to break it. I know it's painful (I've been there) but you have to do your best not to break what is already working.
My second advice is: if you have to add more features, try keeping the existing code structure as much as possible so you don't break the code.
Example: if there's a hideous switch-case statement that you feel could be replaced by proper inheritance, you must be careful and think twice before you decide to start moving things around.
You will definitely find situations where a refactoring is the right approach but beware: refactoring code is more likely to introduce bugs. You have to make that decision from the application owners perspective, not from the developer perspective. So you have to think if the effort (money) necessary to fix the problem is worth a refactoring or not. I've seen many times a developer spending several days fixing something that is not really broken just because he thinks "the code is ugly".
My third advice is: you will get burned if you break the code, it doesn't matter if it's your fault or not.
If you've been hired to give maintenance it doesn't really matter if the application is falling apart because somebody else made bad decisions. From the user perspective it was working before and now you broke it. You broke it!
Joel puts very well in his article explaining several reasons why you should not rewrite legacy code.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
So you should feel really bad about that kind of code (and you should never write anything like that) but maintaining it is a whole different monster.
About my experience: I had to maintain the code for about 1 year and eventually I was able to rewrite it from scratch but not all at once.
What happened is that the code was so bad that new features were impossible to implement. The existing application had serious performance and usability issues. Eventually I was asked to make a change that would take me 3-4 months (mostly because working with that code took me way more time than usual). I thought I could rewrite that whole piece (including implementing the desired new feature) in about 5-6 months. I brought this proposition to the stakeholders and they agree to rewrite it (luckily for me).
After I rewrote this piece they understood I could deliver much better stuff than what they already had. So I was able to rewrite the entire application.
My approach was to rewrite it piece by piece. First I replaced the entire UI (Windows Forms), then I started to replace the communication layer (Web Service calls) and last I replaced the entire Server implementation (it was a thick client / server kind of application).
A couple years later and this application has turned into a beautiful key tool used by the entire company. I'm 100% sure that would've never been possible had I not rewritten the whole thing.
Even though I was able to do it the important part is that the stakeholders approved it and I was able to convince them it was worth the money. So while you have to maintain the existing application just do your best not to break anything and if you're able to convince the owners about the benefit of rewriting it then try to do it like Jack the Ripper: by pieces.
In the linked-to question/answer, the correct solution is to fix the fact that the unsubscribe code is called more than the subscribe code. If there is not time to fix it, then ignoring that specific exception may be a usable short-term workaround. But we all know what that means in production code.
In the general case, there is no clear "one size fits all" answer. There are valid arguments for and against exceptions in general, but the truth is that certain languages and libraries use them so you may as well get used to dealing with them effectively.
Sometimes an exception is relatively harmless and should trigger other behavior than a rethrow. For example, if input is not a valid number (e.g. java.lang.NumberFormatException) and cannot be stored in a numeric field. Maybe there is a way to indicate this on the UI and retry the input operation.
Sometimes an exception is much more serious (e.g. std::bad_alloc) and your program might want to catch it, perform some minimal cleanup, and rethrow to kill itself. In the case of a std::bad_alloc
it would, of course, be a bad idea to allocate more memory during cleanup.
What this means is you really need to evaluate every situation. Think "what caused this exception to be thrown?" and "what is the realistic outcome during this exception handler?" It could mean anything from input validation catching something wrong, to something so severe there is no way to recover other than to write a stack trace or line number to the log and quit.
Best Answer
If the
e2
catch is, as you say, only to catch errors in initializingx
and doingotherStuff
you could extract it to a seperate method. This also seperates the logic nicely and allows you to potentially give a meaningful name tootherStuff
.