C# - Best Practices When Reporting Exception Messages To The User

In my ASP.NET MVC application, I do not want to report all exception messages to the user. But there are certain types of exceptions that I'd like to report to the user, so I created an action filter to decide if it's this particular type of exception, and if so then display the exception's message, otherwise display a generic message. So I created a custom exception called ClientException.

My filter looks something like this:

if (filterContext.Exception is ClientException)
message = filterContext.Exception.Message.Replace("
", " ").Replace("
", " ");
else
message = "An error occured while attemting to perform the last action. Sorry for the inconvenience.";

filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Status = "500 " + message;


I read this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kcwalina/archive/2007/01/30/exceptionhierarchies.aspx where the author recommends using existing .NET exception types to report usage errors. However, by introducing my custom exception, I just have to do a single check in my filter.