best practice for return value in WCF services.

Question

I have a WCF service sitting in the cloud. And my application makes several calls to this WCF service. Is it a best practise: 1] to always use return value as bool which indicates if the operation was sucessful or not. 2] returning the values you meant to return as the OUT parameters

Answer 1

I would:

• return an atomic value (bool, string, int) if appropriate

• return a complex type (a class instance) if I need to return more than one value - make sure to mark that class with [DataContract] and its properties with [DataMember]

• a SOAP fault FaultException<T> when an error occurs; the <T> part allows you to define your own custom error classes, and again - don't forget to mark them with [DataContract] / [DataMember] and declare them as FaultContract on your operations