Question

I’ve been following the tutorial over at http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/getting-started-with-aspnet-web-api/tutorial-your-first-web-api and have setup a Windows Azure account and deployed and everything’s working great.

But the lower section of that tutorial provides a way to get data from the API using jQuery/AJAX but I need to get data from the API from a Windows Metro App (C#).

I’ve been unable to find any tutorials or documentation for POST[ing] and GET[ing] data from a WebAPI from within a Metro style app.

Are there any tuts, or docs or samples or articles that you know of that may help?

Thank you!

Answer 1

From within a metro app, you can use the HttpClient class to call the methods on the Web API. There’s a good post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/henrikn/archive/2012/02/16/httpclient-is-here.aspx about it, and this is a simple usage of it

namespace HelloWebAPI.Models 
{ 
    public class Product 
    { 
        public int Id { get; set; } 
        public string Name { get; set; } 
        public string Category { get; set; } 
        public decimal Price { get; set; } 
    } 
}

namespace MyClient
{
    public partial class MainPage
    {
        //...
        public async void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            var c = new HttpClient();
            var resp = await c.GetAsync("http://localhost:xxxx/api/products");
            var prod = await resp.Content.ReadAsAsync<Product>();
            // ...
        }
    }
}