When I tried replacing JToken with JContainer, ReSharper gave me a Name can be simplified suggestion, which was to change JContainer to JToken. This is because JContainer.Parse is using JToken.Parse.

correct, only failed validations are we dealing with the cost of exceptions.

My thought was that it is expensive to validate via Exceptions, so I ran the simplest tests first before calling JToken.Parse().

The IExceptionLogger requires that we implement LogAsync, which we didn't need. But you're right, it is a better practice to implement an interface in general.

@Stek, as you can likely tell, I'm just trying out Code Review. I've used StackOverflow almost since they went live, but I like the idea behind this site. I've put different types of code up to figure out what seems to be better for feedback, small methods or larger set of code.