Do HttpClient and HttpClientHandler have to be disposed between requests?

Question

System.Net.Http.HttpClient and System.Net.Http.HttpClientHandler in .NET Framework 4.5 implement IDisposable (via System.Net.Http.HttpMessageInvoker).

The usin

Answer 1

Using dependency injection in your constructor makes managing the lifetime of your HttpClient easier - taking the lifetime managemant outside of the code that needs it and making it easily changable at a later date.

My current preference is to create a seperate http client class that inherits from HttpClient once per target endpoint domain and then make it a singleton using dependency injection. public class ExampleHttpClient : HttpClient { ... }

Then I take a constructor dependency on the custom http client in the service classes where I need access to that API. This solves the lifetime problem and has advantages when it comes to connection pooling.

You can see a worked example in related answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/50238944/3140853