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I'm building a Windows Phone 7 Silverlight app. Is there any reason to use RestSharp instead of WebClient? I've looked around on the RestSharp site, but it's not immediately obvious what the benefits are.

Nick Heiner
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    The reader may take a look at [differences between RestSharp and ServiceStack](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10117376/) where the lead of service stack and user Runscope API Tools - the former lead of restsharp [1](http://john-sheehan.com/blog/my-net-open-source-project-management-nightmare), [2](http://haacked.com/archive/2013/09/18/restsharp-104-2-0-released.aspx) - give a recommendation about these two options. – surfmuggle Nov 04 '13 at 20:57
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    The article http://www.diogonunes.com/blog/webclient-vs-httpclient-vs-httpwebrequest/ recommends HttpClient for .Net 4.5+ – Michael Freidgeim Jan 24 '16 at 12:18

1 Answers1

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RestSharp removes the following pain points:

  • Quirks in .NET's HTTP classes (basic authentication is broken, error handling for non-200 responses, etc)
  • Automatic deserialization from response data to POCOs
  • Simplified API (request.AddParameter(name, value) instead of manually compiling request bodies
  • Simplified request/response semantics, especially for async (however, it's opinionated for async and may not meet everyone's needs, in which case I would also suggest evaluating Hammock)

Deserialization is probably the biggest gain since for most APIs you don't have to do very much to get the XML or JSON into your C# objects.

I would check out these pages for more info

https://github.com/restsharp/RestSharp/wiki https://github.com/restsharp/RestSharp/wiki/RestSharp-Blog-Posts-and-Links

Feel free to post any questions here or on the Google Group

John Sheehan
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