Menu

Subscribe

HttpClient: A Silverlight WebClient Alternative With Cancellation and Timeout Support

Ever since we switched from WCF RIA Services to a ASP .Net Web API for supplying data to our Silverlight application we have been using the System.Net.WebClient class to make the HTTP requests and download the JSON response into Silverlight.

This seemed to be the recommended and most used solution for completing the task we were attempting, but, even in the beginning, some things didn't seem quite right for the use case we had.

Firstly, despite being listed in the .Net Framework 4.5 version of the class, there was no Timeout property available. As it turns out, this is simply a limitation of the Silverlight implementation of the class. This led us to attempt to apply timeout functionality to the class in Silverlight. All attempts at achieving this were unsuccessful.

The result of this was that within the DataAgent class where were declaring and using the WebClient instance we added a timer object, which was set to tick until either:

  • The WebClient call returned sucessfully and we stopped the timer from ticking.
  • A pre-specified time period elapsed without the data returning and on the next invocation of the tick event, the CancelAsync() method on the WebClient was called, which, according to the MSDN documentation:

    Cancels a pending asynchronous operation.

There is no callback associated with this operation so we believed that it was a synchronous operation and that we could use this, on the occasions when the user switched parameters before the current loading operation had completed, to cancel the executing load and immediately start the next load operation.

This was necessary as the WebClient in Silverlight is only capable of performing one operation at a time and if a second is attempted before the first has completed, an exception is thrown. We managed to work around these shortcomings for a while as we thought the only alternative was to use the underlying WebRequest class and manually create the requests we needed the system to execute, something we had done already for the few parts of the system which needed to perform HTTP Post requests to the Web API. This all changed when, via Twitter, we discovered the Microsoft HTTP Client Libraries NuGet package. Which, on the website is described as: This package includes HttpClient for sending requests over HTTP, as well as HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage for processing HTTP messages. This package is not supported in Visual Studio 2010, and is only required for projects targeting .NET Framework 4.5 or .NET for Windows Store apps when consuming a library that uses this package. Supported Platforms:
  • .NET Framework 4
  • .NET for Windows Store apps
  • Windows Phone 7.5 and 8
  • Silverlight 4 and 5
  • Portable Class Libraries

Compared to the severely limited Silverlight WebClient, the HttpClient included within this package is a revelation. It had support for everything that we needed:

  • Multiple concurrent operations
  • Cancellation via CancellationToken support
  • Timeout support either via a property on the HttpClient or via the CancelAfter value set on the provided CancellationToken
  • Task Asynchronous Pattern support (thanks to the Async for .NET Framework 4, Silverlight 4 and 5, and Windows Phone 7.5 and 8 NuGet package)

In addition to all of this goodness, there is a support for HTTP Post requests from a named method so we have managed to axe the frankly pretty horrendous WebRequest code we were relying upon!