Proper catching of specific exceptions through web service

Question

I am currently using a C# .NET Service in our client program. As part of the server design, several custom made exceptions are thrown to indicate specific errors (as in any

Answer 1

The proper way would be to define fault contracts. For example in your web service you could do the following:

[DataContract]
public class NoRoomsAvailableFaultContract
{
    [DataMember]
    public string Message { get; set; }
}

Next you declare this contract for a given service operation

[ServiceContract]
public interface IMyServiceContract
{
    [OperationContract]
    [FaultContract(typeof(NoRoomsAvailableFaultContract))]
    void MyOperation();
}

And you implement it like so:

public class MyService : IMyServiceContract 
{
    public void MyOperation()
    {
        if (somethingWentWrong)
        {
            var faultContract = new NoRoomsAvailableFaultContract()
            {
                Message = "ERROR MESSAGE"
            };
            throw new FaultException(faultContract);
        }
    }
}

In this case the NoRoomsAvailableFaultContract will be exposed in the WSDL and svcutil.exe could generate a proxy class. Then you could catch this exception:

try
{
    myServiceProxy.MyOperation();
}
catch (FaultException ex)
{
    Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
}