Consuming Web Services Using HTTP Clients and Getting Consumers

Now that we have built and tested our Northwind service, we will learn how to call it from any .NET app using the HttpClient class and its factory.

Understanding HttpClient

The easiest way to consume a web service is to use the HttpClient class. However, many people use it wrongly because it implements IDisposable , and Microsoft’s own documentation shows poor usage of it.

Usually, when a type implements IDisposable, we should create it inside a using statement to ensure it is disposed of as soon as possible. HttpClient is different because it is shared, reentrant, and partially thread-safe.

The problem has to do with how the underlying network sockets have to be managed. The bottom line is that we should use a single instance of it for ...