Comparison of HTTP libraries

In .NET applications, we often need to make HTTP calls. In these cases, we can use the standard HttpClient class or some other library. For example, I have already used Refit and RestSharp. But I have never decided which one to use. Always the library was already utilized in the project I was working with. Therefore, I decided to compare these libraries to form my own meaningful opinion, which one is better and why. This is what I will do in this article.

But how should I compare these libraries? I have no doubt that they all can send HTTP requests and receive responses. After all, these libraries wouldn't have become so popular if they couldn't do that. Therefore, I'm more interested in additional features that are in demand in large corporative applications.

Ok, let's start.

Testing of dependency tree

Today, the use of dependency containers is widespread. The constructor of your classes accepts instances of other classes, they depend on other classes, etc. And the dependency container manages the construction of the entire instance tree.

This system has its price. For example, during testing, you must create instances of all the dependencies of a class in order to test this class. You can use something like Moq for this task. But in this case, there is a problem with class changes. If you want to add or remove any constructor parameter, you will also have to change the tests, even if this parameter does not affect them.

There is another task that we want to solve during testing. Let's say we want to test the work of not one isolated class, but the joint work of several classes in some part of our system. Our dependency container creates a whole tree of instances of various classes. And you want to test the whole tree. Let's see how we can do this, what obstacles we will face and how we can overcome them.

My experience with OData

OData is very interesting technology. Using several lines of code you can support filtering, paging, partial selection, ... for your data. Today GraphQL is replacing it, but OData is still very attractive.

Nevertheless, there are several pitfalls I had to deal with. Here I want to share my experience with OData.

Web request sequence visualization

Modern requests to web services are very complex. The service you are calling can call other services, they are other services, etc. All these requests can be executed in parallel. Of course, the logging system stores information from all participants in the request. But the clocks on different services can be slightly out of sync, so it is not easy to recreate the correct picture. And if we add message queues here (Azure EventHub, RabbitMQ, ...), the task becomes even more difficult.

Here I'll try to create a system that will allow us to quickly plot the sequence diagram of events during my request.

Ok, let's start.

Drag and Drop in WPF TreeView

Today I want to describe the implementation of drag and drop functionality inside WPF TreeView control. It sounds like a simple task, but took surprisingly a lot of time from me. So let's start.

My work with LiteDB

Recently I was looking for a storage system for my program. This is a desktop application that creates many objects and searches for text in them. So I thought: "Why don't I try something new." Instead of an SQL database, I could use some kind of document database. But I didn't want to have a separate server, I wanted this database to work with a simple file. Search of the Internet for this kind of databases for .NET applications quickly led me to LiteDB. And here I want to share my experience with this database.

Single database for multiple microservices with FluentMigrator

If you have multiple microservices, it is common to use a separate database for each of them. But recently we faced the following problem. Our price plan on database hosting provider includes only limited number of databases. We can't create new database for each microservice as it is too expensive. How can we solve this problem?