Fun with the HttpClient pipeline
A few years ago, Microsoft introduced the HttpClient class as a modern alternative to HttpWebRequest to make web requests from .NET apps. Not only is this new API much easier to use, cleaner, and asynchronous by design, it’s also easily extensible.
You might have noticed that HttpClient has a constructor that accepts a HttpMessageHandler. What is this handler? It’s an object that accepts a request (HttpRequestMessage) and returns a response (HttpResponseMessage); how it does that is entirely dependent on the implementation.