This exception indicates that illegal data was passed to a method or constructor call. Note that illegal data is entirely contextual—the data may be a legitimate .NET value, but inappropriate for the use in question. Although .NET languages are type-safe in that you can't pass a string as a parameter when an integer is expected, there is nothing to keep you from passing a null or invalid value, such as sending (2001, 13, 32) to DateTime's constructor. However, there is no 32nd day of the 13th month of the year 2001, and if you try to initialize such a date, you'll get an exception.

The ArgumentException class (or one of its subclasses, ArgumentNullException or ArgumentOutOfRangeException) indicates that a method argument violated such a constraint. If you need to implement this exception in your own code, consider using one of its subclasses instead, since they represent common argument exceptions.

public class ArgumentException : SystemException {
// Public Constructors
   public ArgumentException( );
   public ArgumentException(string message);
   public ArgumentException(string message, Exception innerException);
   public ArgumentException(string message, string paramName);
   public ArgumentException(string message, string paramName, Exception innerException);
// Protected Constructors
   protected ArgumentException(System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info, 
        System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context);
// Public Instance Properties
   public override string Message{get; } 
// overrides Exception
   public virtual string ParamName{get; }
// Public Instance Methods
   public override void GetObjectData(System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationInfo info, 
        System.Runtime.Serialization.StreamingContext context);  
// overrides Exception
}

Hierarchy

Object Exception(System.Runtime.Serialization.ISerializable) SystemException ArgumentException

Subclasses

ArgumentNullException, ArgumentOutOfRangeException, DuplicateWaitObjectException