what is the use/purpose of try and catch in c#?

You would always use these together. The "try" block surrounds the code that might generate an exception (error), and the "catch" block contains the code that you want to run if an exception occurs.

I had the same problem when I first saw it myself. Programming is very conceptual and sometimes it helps to just run the code in your head.

Try and catch statements are used to prevent an error from crashing the whole program.

So let's say we created a simple Console Application that asks the user to type in their name. If the user typed in a number and your next line of code was to greet the user with their input.. You don't want to tell the user Hello 3.14. Instead you would want to tell the user that a number is not a valid input.

This is a very simple example and there are other ways to fix that problem instead of using a try and catch statement. There are more complex examples where you would definitely want to make sure the error is caught.

Just think "try" and "catch", remember when I said programming is conceptual... You "try" some code that might cause and error and "catch" it with another line to prevent your code from crashing.

Hope this helps,

Cheers!