Question

My group is developing a service-based (.NET WCF) application and we’re trying to decide how to handle exceptions in our internal services. Should we throw exceptions? Return exceptions serialized as XML? Just return an error code?

Keep in mind that the user will never see these exceptions, it’s only for other parts of the application.

Answer 1

WCF uses SoapFaults as its native way of transmitting exceptions from either the service to the client, or the client to the service.

You can declare a custom SOAP fault using the FaultContract attribute in your contract interface:

For example:

[ServiceContract(Namespace='foobar')] interface IContract {     [OperationContract]     [FaultContract(typeof(CustomFault))]     void DoSomething(); }   [DataContract(Namespace='Foobar')] class CustomFault {     [DataMember]     public string error;      public CustomFault(string err)     {         error = err;     } }  class myService : IContract {     public void DoSomething()     {         throw new FaultException<CustomFault>( new CustomFault('Custom Exception!'));     } }