In earlier versions of C# (including .NET 3.5), Access Violations did not inherit from Exception, and could not be caught using "catch (Exception ex) { }" syntax. You had to use "catch { }" syntax instead.
You still cannot catch AccessViolationException, StackOverflowException or ExecutionEngineException.
This is by design because each indicates catastrophic unrecoverable failure (you could have a couple of hand-wavy arguments about AVE dereferencing wrong address but, really, that indicates critical error in implementation or memory corruption still).
You should never see any of these regardless. Aside from abusing stackalloc by passing a large number I guess.
