Using HttpClientFactory without dependency injection

A. I want an opinionated builder abstraction for configuring HttpClientFactory. B. I don’t need that. I just want an HttpClient with good network behavior by default.

I’d like to stress out that using the DI container for absolutely everything is not the best example of design. Insisting that all developers need to use the container for things like HTTP client factory, in-memory cache, distributed cache, logging and so on, creates impediments for developers that would otherwise avoid using DI containers altogether. I personally prefer to construct my dependency tree in the Startup class explicitly and don’t rely on something else that I don’t control to resolve dependencies for me.

There’s was an issue https://github.com/aspnet/Extensions/issues/615 for using ILogger without the container and it is fixed for .NET Core 3. I would expect that all other factories would follow the same approach and expose a way to instantiate factories without using the container, at least for the reason of consistency.

I hear you but those Dns problems are solved by tweaking either service point manager (on .NET Framework) or by tweaking the setting non SocketsHttpHandler on .NET Core. If that doesn’t work then we’d need to do fix those issues in the platform (at least on .NET Core). If you have evidence that this doesn’t work, then we’d love to hear it. The HttpClientFactory is meant to be a configuration API, not a lifetime management API. In fact, we’re likely going to remove the handler pooling and instead set the appropriate settings based on the platform to avoid this confusion.

The default behavior of the HttpClient shouldn’t require navigating gotchas that I have to spend all day reading blog articles to solve. Once I’ve read 3 blog articles I have 5 different solutions, 2 of them tell me “using HttpClientFactory is the easiest way to get it right”. The other 3 warn me if I’m not an experienced networking engineer, I might do more harm than good. None of these issues are in the HttpClient documentation. It’s the Tomb of Horrors of pits of failure.

I’ve been using .NET since 2003 and I still worry every time I use HttpClient that I’m missing some ancestral knowledge because I didn’t follow the right blog post. It’d be nice if MS retooled it to be right by default and let me tweak it if I have special needs and understand what those needs are. It’s possible it works better in .NET Core? I have to configure it differently there. What’s that mean for Xamarin? That’s sort of .NET Core but actually Mono, right? What’s that going to mean for MAUI in .NET 5? Will I have to learn four ways to configure HttpClient?

No other language or runtime I use makes it this hard to write an application that needs to make HTTP requests.