RestSharp v. WebClient?

Question

I'm building a Windows Phone 7 Silverlight app. Is there any reason to use RestSharp instead of WebClient? I've looked around on the RestSharp site, but it's not immediately obvious what the benefits are.

Answer 1

RestSharp removes the following pain points:

• Quirks in .NET's HTTP classes (basic authentication is broken, error handling for non-200 responses, etc)
• Automatic deserialization from response data to POCOs
• Simplified API (request.AddParameter(name, value) instead of manually compiling request bodies
• Simplified request/response semantics, especially for async (however, it's opinionated for async and may not meet everyone's needs, in which case I would also suggest evaluating Hammock)

Deserialization is probably the biggest gain since for most APIs you don't have to do very much to get the XML or JSON into your C# objects.

I would check out these pages for more info

http://github.com/johnsheehan/RestSharp/wiki/_pages
http://github.com/johnsheehan/RestSharp/wiki/RestSharp-Blog-Posts-Links

Feel free to post any questions here or on the Google Group