Perhaps I’m overlooking something, but can client WCF not handle a server response that isn’t a 200? For example, I’m trying to consume a service that returns a 400 when you asked for something naughty, but the body of the response is still a perfectly good and consumable SOAP message. It does the same for requested data that doesn’t exist, returning a 404 but still having good hints about what the problem is. The WCF proxy seems to just puke and I can’t get at the underlying body of the message.
Is that really how it rolls?
The only way to do this is to capture the protocol exception and then manually unserialize the envelope. The channel is hard coded to always throw a fault anytime an non 200 web response.