Inside Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Web Services

Summary

Typical Web services return failures using SOAP faults. However, because Exchange Web Services makes heavy use of batched operations, SOAP faults are not the primary mechanism for reporting error conditions due to their "whole call" affinity. Response messages are used instead, which provide for item-by-item success or failure information. That being said, SOAP faults are used in a certain cases, such as when a schema invalid request is passed in or when a failure occurs while the SOAP headers are being processed. After we discussed error information within response messages, we attempted to simplify error handling by writing some additional classes and methods to wrap error conditions and report errors in a uniform way. This works well ...