Json.Net is a popular framework for working with JSON. In particular, it has a bunch of features that are not supported by the DataContractJsonSerializer such as being much more flexible in what kind of types it can serialize and exactly how they should...

Several of the ASP.NET Web API tutorials (see for example “Your First ASP.NET Web API” ) show how you can use ASP.NET Web API with MVC applications. However, you can equally well add a Web API to a Web Form enabling the same Web API support as in MVC...

HttpClient is a modern HTTP client for .NET. It provides a flexible and extensible API for accessing all things exposed through HTTP. HttpClient has been available for a while as part of WCF Web API preview 6 but is now shipping as part of ASP.NET Web...

Many popular Web APIs such as the twitter API use some form of OAuth for authentication. HttpClient does not have baked in support for OAuth but using the HttpClient extensibility model you can add OAuth as part of the HttpMessageHandler pipeline. The...

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database that makes it a great backend for Web APIs which lend themselves towards a document store rather than a relational store . In this blog we show how you can use MongoDB with ASP.NET Web API to build an ApiController...

ASP.NET Web API supports asynchronous actions using the new Task-based programming model introduced in .NET 4. In .NET 4.5 the model has improved further and in addition is supported directly from C# using the new async and await keywords (see “ Visual...

If you don’t need the full ASP.NET MVC 4 installer with project and item templates for Visual Studio 2010 then you can download the various ASP.NET Web API packages directly from NuGet (see list of packages below). If you are new to NuGet then it is a...

Downloading content to a local file is a common thing to do. The current version of HttpClient doesn’t yet provide out of the box support for saving content to a file but this sample shows how to extend HttpClient with new ways of reading content retrieved...

One of the common discussions to have around network APIs is whether streams should be push or pull . That is, do you push content to the network, or does the infrastructure pull it from you and copy it to the network? In general there is no “right” way...