Brendan Enrick  Daily Software Development  Try Writing Try
Methods  When I say "Try Methods", I am of course referring to
the common prefix "Try" on a method, which implies that the
method is going to attempt to do what you're asking by using an
output parameter for the operation and using the return value to
indicate whether the attempt succeeded.  The common ones that
people see in the .NET Framework are the TryParse methods, which
attempt to parse something and if it can't be parse, they assign
the default value to the output parameter and return false. If
the succeed, the parsed value will be placed in the output
parameter and the return value will be true. If the code failed,
the convention is to use the type’s default value to assign to
the output parameter. This lets you write code like this:  int
someNumber; int.TryParse(userInput, out someNumber); // use the
number entered or the default 0 int result = 1 + someNumber;
This is also great when you're going to be checking whether the
method succeeded