Silverlight logging of errors

Question

What is the correct way of handling errors on the client side of Silverlight applications? I tried building a service endpoint that would receive details about the error and then would write that string to the database. The problem is, the error's text exceeds the maximum byte length, so I can't send the exception message and stacktrace. What would be a better way of handling errors that end up at the client side?

Answer 1

Try handling faults...I used this pattern from MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd470096%28VS.96%29.aspx

Answer 2

If you find you message is too long to send to your logging web service then try setting your binding properties such as maxBufferSize and maxStringContentLength to appropriately large values. They default to 16KB, personally i have set mine to 2147483647 (which is int.MaxValue).

Obviously you cannot send the raw exception straight to the logging web service (exceptions are not serializable), what i did was write a function that takes an exception and walks it, translating it into a WCF friendly structure that can then be passed to my logging end point. Of course you need to ensure that if this fails you have a backup plan, like maybe logging it to isolated storage if you are running in browser, or logging it to the user's file system if you are running elevated OOB.