Pipeline

Middlewhat? The ASP.NET Core architecture features a system of middleware, which are pieces of code that handle requests and responses. Middleware are chained to each other to form a pipeline. Incoming requests are passed through the pipeline, where each middleware has a chance to do something with them before passing them to the next middleware. Outgoing responses are also passed through the pipeline, in reverse order. If this sounds very abstract, the following schema from the official ASP.

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.