Question

I just want to learn something new here about my code.

I have the following function ,is it the optimized way to return if I had a problem during writing to a file? or there is a better way doing so..

public static bool WriteFile(ByteBuffer data  , String fileName, bool append)
        {
            var writer = new StreamWriter(fileName, append);
            var errorVal = true;
            try
            {
                writer.Write(data);
                writer.Flush();
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {

                errorVal = false;
            }
            finally
            {
                writer.Dispose();
            }

            return errorVal;
        }

Answer 1

If you really want to eat all exceptions and just return a bool, I would rather do it like this:

public static bool WriteFile(ByteBuffer data, String fileName, bool append)
{
    using(var writer = new StreamWriter(fileName, append))
    {
        try
        {
            writer.Write(data);
            return true;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            // log the exception details; don't just eat it.
        }
    }
    return false;
}

That said, if it was my own code, I would probably not catch the exception at all in here, but rather leave that up to the calling code:

public static void WriteFile(ByteBuffer data, String fileName, bool append)
{
    using(var writer = new StreamWriter(fileName, append))
    {
        writer.Write(data);
    }
}