🩹 [Patch]: Remove unnecessary try..catch blocks

[vercellone]

Describe the change

I'm seeing this anti-pattern a lot in your code.

try{
    # Do something
} catch {
    throw $_
}

If you aren't going to do anything with the caught exception there is no benefit to catching it. It adds unnecessary runtime overhead, and adversely affects readability.

Also, if you are going to re-throw the original exception it is better to just throw. throw $_ adds unnecessary overhead.

[MariusStorhaug]

Feel free to suggest a good way to implement error reporting on the top level functions!
They are "placeholders" until I have gone through some reading on how to handle it using error records.

[vercellone]

This is a heavily debated topic.

My 2 cents: Less is more. I have tried a few approaches to capturing and repackaging errors and none have proven as resilient and pain free as avoiding try..catch blocks in most public functions.

When I use a try..catch block, it is usually in a common function (like Invoke-GitHubAPI) and generally looks like this:

try {
    # Do something
}
catch {
     # Optionally log the Exception.  DO NOT alter it but DO add more details if useful.
     if ([something I can ignore or work around]) {
         # Do that
     }
     else {
         throw # re-throw the original exception
     }
}

I also often use try..finally (with no catch).

I fully advocate the notion of leading people to the pit of success.
But when it comes to exceptions (especially those involving a PowerShell module that wraps HTTP requests) it is frustrating when the error is in any way altered or obfuscated from that thrown by the underlying API. Depending on your implementation it can also hinder end users' ability to use -ErrorAction/$ErrorActionPreference effectively.