What's the significance of -532459699?

.net exception magic-numbers
Kris Harper picture Kris Harper · Feb 6, 2012 · Viewed 8.4k times · Source

This is a number that's returned as an exit code in many .NET exceptions (particularly COM exceptions, I think).

In this question someone used Reflector to find out that this value was initialized to a private variable in nearly every Exception constructor.

My question is, why? What significance does this number have? It's hard to believe that it was chosen arbitrarily. I don't even see any numeric significance (e.g., in its binary or hex representation).

Answer

Gabe picture Gabe · Feb 6, 2012

Did you pay attention to its hex representation, E0434F4D? Here's a brief synopsis:

E0 - represents E
43 - ASCII for C
4F - ASCII for O
4D - ASCII for M

So it's ECOM, or "exception from COM".

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