delete azure table storage row without checking for existence

Question

I've been using azure table storage for years, and I'm not sure what the "proper" way to do this is with the newest WindowsAzure.Storage library, version 5.0.1-preview (for use in a new ASP.NET 5 application):

Problem: Given a partition key and row key, delete the row without checking for existence first, and without failing if it does not exist.

Current Solution: This code works... but the exception handling is confusing:

public async Task DeleteRowAsync(CloudTable table, string partition, string row)
{
    var entity = new DynamicTableEntity(partition, row);
    entity.ETag = "*";

    var op = TableOperation.Delete(entity);
    try
    {
        await table.ExecuteAsync(op);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        var result = RequestResult.TranslateFromExceptionMessage(ex.Message);
        if (result == null || result.HttpStatusCode != 404)
            throw ex;
    }
}

Questions:

1. The exception itself pointed me to this TranslateFromExceptionMessage method... I can't find a whole lot of information on that and WrappedStorageException (the type of the exception that is thrown). Is this some kind of new/preferred way to check for 404 errors on storage exceptions? Does anyone know if all storage exceptions will now use this, or do I need to write code to test and figure it out?

2. There is an InnerException of type StorageException. Presumably our older code that used StorageException.RequestInformation.HttpStatusCode could access this inner exception in the same way. Is that "OK", or is parsing these new XML error messages better or more robust somehow?

3. Is there a different approach altogether that I should be considering for this case?

Answer 1

The RequestResult.TranslateFromExceptionMessage method is now marked [Obsolete] and I wanted a way to ignore 404's myself.

Based on your tip to check out the RequestInformation.HttpStatusCode I came up with the following:

try
{
    await table.ExecuteAsync(op);
}
catch (StorageException storEx)
{
    if (storEx.RequestInformation.HttpStatusCode != 404)
    {
        throw;
    }
}