A code base that uses return values for reporting the success or failure tends to have nested if-statements sprinkled all over the code. Quite often, a caller forgets to check the return value anyhow. Structured exception handling has been introduced to allow you to throw exceptions and catch or replace exceptions at a higher layer. In most systems it is quite common to throw exceptions whenever an unexpected situations occurs.

Wrong example:

static bool CopyObject(SampleClass original)
{
    if (original == null)
    {
        return false;
    }
}

Correct example:

static void CopyObject(SampleClass original)
{
    if (original == null)
    {
        throw new System.ArgumentException("Parameter cannot be null", "original");
    }
}