How to get exception information when calling JSON web service

Question

In .NET 3.5, I had the following code:

[WebService(Namespace = \"http://kitchenpc.com/schemas/\")]
[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]
         


        

Answer 1

The exception types are not serializable. Use FaultException instead.

throw new FaultException(..);

Answer 2

Ah, this was a stupid issue. The exception information only appears if you have:

<customErrors mode="Off" />

In your web.config (under <system.web>). I'm actually not sure if this is a .NET 3.5 -> .NET 4.5 change in behavior, or if it got broke when I was re-writing my web.config build process using web.config transforms.

Does anyone know if there's a way to control this on a per web-service level? I'd rather not show full debug info on normal page requests.

Update:

I also came to the conclusion that throwing exceptions to communicate error information from a web service is really not a good design. In fact, I wrote a post on the subject on my blog for those interested.