Easy REST on .NET: System.Net.WebClient

If you've been keeping up with what Project Astoria has to offer, you'll notice that the REST-ful style of accessing resources is mentioned over and over again.

One of the nice things about REST-ful style architectures is that it's easy to find support in many platforms, libraries and languages. And, the less time you spend working on plumbing, the more time and energy you have to focus on the others parts of software development: additional functionality, improved performance, etc.

One of the easiest (and lowest-ovehead) ways to communicate with REST-ful services is through the System.Net.WebClient class in .NET. There are additional classes to deal with HTTP classes, but for simple interactions, this class probably does most of what you need. Even though it's been around for a while, every now and then I run into someone who hasn't heard of it, so I thought it might be a good idea to bring it up here.