The Exception Handling API

As we mentioned before, in order to provide a more convenient approach to handle our exceptions in BizTalk, we would need to write some custom code and define the patterns our development team should follow to use them. Over time this has been done by many teams around the world, but now there's no need to reinvent the wheel as this is provided by the ESB Toolkit.

The fault message concept

The whole exception handling feature in the ESB Toolkit is built around the fault message concept.

A fault message is a special type of message that contains all the information about the failure that happened while processing at some point in our ESB. It's the canonical representation of a failure in the ESB, and contains all the relevant information about the fault and its schema is Microsoft.Practices.ESB.ExceptionHandling.Schemas.Reporting.FaultMessage.

Failed messages can come from three different sources, and so they need to be normalized so any downstream components know how...