First, let’s clear up some terminology: “asynchronous” (async) means that it may yield control back to the calling thread before it starts. In an async method, those “yield” points are await expressions. This is very different than the term “asynchronous”, as (mis)used by the MSDN documentation for years to mean “executes on a background thread”. … Read more
The general consensus is that you do not (should not) need to dispose of HttpClient. Many people who are intimately involved in the way it works have stated this. See Darrel Miller’s blog post and a related SO post: HttpClient crawling results in memory leak for reference. I’d also strongly suggest that you read the … Read more
The ASP.NET Web API has replaced the WCF Web API previously mentioned. I thought I’d post an updated answer since most of these responses are from early 2012, and this thread is one of the top results when doing a Google search for “call restful service C#”. Current guidance from Microsoft is to use the … Read more
Normally, you would want to return a Task. The main exception should be when you need to have a void return type (for events). If there’s no reason to disallow having the caller await your task, why disallow it? async methods that return void are special in another aspect: they represent top-level async operations, and … Read more