I understand it doesn't throw an Exception and because of that it might be sightly faster, but also, you're most likely using it to convert input to data you can use, so I don't think it's used so often to make that much of difference in terms of performance.

Anyway, the examples I saw are all along the lines of an if/else block with TryParse, the else returning an error message. And to me, that's basically the same thing as using a try/catch block with the catch returning an error message.

So, am I missing something? Is there a situation when this is actually useful?