SOLVED
After banging my head on the wall for a couple days with this issue, it was looking like the problem had something to do with the content type negotiation between the client and server. I dug deeper into that using Fiddler to check the request details coming from the client app, here's a screenshot of the raw request as captured by fiddler:
What's obviously missing there is the Content-Type header, even though I was setting it as seen in the code sample in my original post. I thought it was strange that the Content-Type never came through even though I was setting it, so I had another look at my other (working) code calling a different Web API service, the only difference was that I happened to be setting the req.ContentType property prior to writing to the request body in that case. I made that change to this new code and that did it, the Content-Type was now showing up and I got the expected success response from the web service. The new code from my .NET client now looks like this:
req.Method = "POST"
req.ContentType = "application/json"
lstrPagingJSON = JsonSerializer(Of Paging)(lPaging)
bytData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(lstrPagingJSON)
req.ContentLength = bytData.Length
reqStream = req.GetRequestStream()
reqStream.Write(bytData, 0, bytData.Length)
reqStream.Close()
'// Content-Type was being set here, causing the problem
'req.ContentType = "application/json"
That's all it was, the ContentType property just needed to be set prior to writing to the request body
I believe this behavior is because once content is written to the body it is streamed to the service endpoint being called, any other attributes pertaining to the request need to be set prior to that. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if this needs more detail.