Question

I would like to use a COM object in my application.
How can I make sure the object is registered in the machine?

The only solution I found (also on SO) was to use a try-catch block around the initialization:

try {
    Foo.Bar COM_oObject = new Foo.Bar();
} catch (Exception ee) {
    // Something went wrong during init of COM object
}

Can I do it in any other way?
I feel its wrong to deal with an error by expecting it and reporting it, I would rather know I will fail and avoid it to begin with.

Answer 1

You are using exception handling the right way: to fail gracefully from a specific situation that you know how to recover from.

There’s not a problem with using try-catch in this case, but you could at least catch more specifically : ComException.