ArgumentException is thrown when a method is invoked and at least one of the passed arguments does not meet the parameter specification of the called method. All instances of ArgumentException should carry a meaningful error message describing the invalid argument, as well as the expected range of values for the argument.

The primary derived classes of ArgumentException are ArgumentNullException and ArgumentOutOfRangeException. These derived classes should be used instead of ArgumentException, except in situations where neither of the derived classes is acceptable. For example, exceptions should be thrown by:

• ArgumentNullException whenever null is passed to a method that does not accept it as a valid argument.

• ArgumentOutOfRangeException when the value of an argument is outside the range of acceptable values; for example, when the value "46" is passed as the month argument during the creation of a DateTime.

If the method call does not have any argument or if the failure does not involve the arguments themselves, then InvalidOperationException should be used.

ArgumentException uses the HRESULT COR_E_ARGUMENT, which has the value 0x80070057.

For a list of initial property values for an instance of ArgumentException, see the ArgumentException constructors.

The following example demonstrates an error that causes a ArgumentException exception to be thrown by the system.

using System;
public class MyClass {}
public class ArgExceptionExample {
  public static void Main() {
    MyClass my = new MyClass();
    string s = "sometext";
    try {
       int i = s.CompareTo(my);
    }
    catch (ArgumentException e) {
       Console.WriteLine("Error: {0}",e);
    }
  }
}
   

The output is