I am trying to develop a client application that calls a RESTful web service. As part of a RESTful design, the service uses a variety of HTTP status codes to communicate state back to the caller. For instance, if I request a resource that doesn't exist, the service responds with a 404 status code. Likewise, if I pass in malformed parameters, the service responds with a 400 (Bad Request) status code. Silverlight 5 automatically converts these into WebExceptions. Is there anyway I can get SL to not throw exceptions but return a legitimate response object with the status code, etc set to the what was received so that I can decide how to handle the response in my code?
(To further clarify, it appears this is only the case for status codes in the 400 and 500 ranges.)
AFAIK, there is no solution to avoid exceptions. Worse than that, it might be hard or even impossible to get the actual HTTP code (I'm not certain there, I haven't tried too hard).
You'll probably want to develop an HTTP request tool that traps WebException and provide an error status to the caller.