Best way to call a JSON WebService from a NET Console

Question

I am hosting a web service in ASP Net MVC3 which returns a Json string  What is the best way to call the webservice from a c  console application  and parse the return into a  NET object   Should I reference MVC3 in my console app   Json Net has some nice methods for serializing and deserializing  NET objects  but I don t see that it has ways for POSTing and GETing values from a webservice   Or should I just create my own helper method for POSTing and GETing to the web service  How would I serialize my  net object to key value pairs

User · Answer

Although the existing answers are valid approaches   they are antiquated   HttpClient is a modern interface for working with RESTful web services   Check the examples section of the page in the link   it has a very straightforward use case for an asynchronous HTTP GET    using  var client   new System Net Http HttpClient          return await client GetStringAsync  https   reqres in api users 3      uri

User · Answer

WebClient to fetch the contents from the remote url and JavaScriptSerializer or Json NET to deserialize the JSON into a  NET object  For example you define a model class which will reflect the JSON structure and then   using  var client   new WebClient          var json   client DownloadString  http   example com json        var serializer   new JavaScriptSerializer        SomeModel model   serializer Deserialize lt SomeModel gt  json          TODO  do something with the model     There are also some REST client frameworks you may checkout such as RestSharp

User · Answer

I use HttpWebRequest to GET from the web service  which returns me a JSON string  It looks something like this for a GET      Returns JSON string string GET string url         HttpWebRequest request    HttpWebRequest WebRequest Create url       try           WebResponse response   request GetResponse            using  Stream responseStream   response GetResponseStream                  StreamReader reader   new StreamReader responseStream  System Text Encoding UTF8               return reader ReadToEnd                        catch  WebException ex            WebResponse errorResponse   ex Response          using  Stream responseStream   errorResponse GetResponseStream                          StreamReader reader   new StreamReader responseStream  System Text Encoding GetEncoding  utf-8                 String errorText   reader ReadToEnd                   log errorText                   throw            I then use JSON Net to dynamically parse the string  Alternatively  you can generate the C  class statically from sample JSON output using this codeplex tool  http   jsonclassgenerator codeplex com   POST looks like this      POST a JSON string void POST string url  string jsonContent         HttpWebRequest request    HttpWebRequest WebRequest Create url       request Method    POST        System Text UTF8Encoding encoding   new System Text UTF8Encoding        Byte   byteArray   encoding GetBytes jsonContent        request ContentLength   byteArray Length      request ContentType     application json        using  Stream dataStream   request GetRequestStream              dataStream Write byteArray  0  byteArray Length             long length   0      try           using  HttpWebResponse response    HttpWebResponse request GetResponse                  length   response ContentLength                      catch  WebException ex               Log exception and throw as for GET example above           I use code like this in automated tests of our web service

[c#] Best way to call a JSON WebService from a .NET Console

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