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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

C# / .NET had System.Net.WebRequest since 1.1. It's similar in principle to Requests.

No, no it's not. (Http)WebRequest IS AWFUL. I built RestSharp because HWR is so bad. WebClient is closer to requests, but still horribly awful if you know anything about HTTP.

The new System.Net.Http.HttpClient in .NET 4.5 is closer to Requests and not entirely bad, if a little rigid.

Just out of curiosity, what's so awful about WebRequest? I've been using it for years for various things and never really had a problem with it.

  - It's too low level for quick stuff
  - It handles HTTP basic auth wrong
  - It throws an exception, AN EXCEPTION, for any response that isn't 2xx
  - Async is an ugly mess
  - In love with streams
  - Horribly inconsistent across framework profiles
  - ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue
  - Inconsistent header handling and restrictions
  - Terrible cookie API

I think it's fine for simple scenarios (i.e. plain GET), but it breaks down in a hurry and the fact that you have to read out of the response stream is real overhead.

> I think it's fine for simple scenarios (i.e. plain GET)

So's python's urllib2, the point of `request` is that as soon as you go even slightly beyond very basic GET and POST, it breaks down quickly in a horrible mess.

It's not fine for a plain GET, it's awful.

I'm still surprised every time I use it that they've not released a modern library for it in .Net.

The async handling was the deal breaker for me. I gritted my teeth through the other stuff but finally gave up at that point.

I'm not your parent poster but I personally dislike that you have to instantiate a separated Response object, and that you have to fetch a stream, even for tiny responses. In those Python/Ruby frameworks it's just one line. I always end up writing a wrapper just to change it.

And this one is a pet peeve, but I hate that verbose stateful OO idiom where you instantiate an object (with a factory) and then use setters to change properties, instead of setting it all in a single command. I don't know if other .NET HTTP libraries change that, though...

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