Just shipped a new release of RestSharp to NuGet. For those who don’t know, RestSharp is a simple REST and HTTP API Client for .NET.

This release is primarily a bug fix release with a whole lotta bug fixes. It should be fully compatible with the previous version. If it’s not, I’m sorry.

Some highlights:

  • Added Task<T> Overloads for async requests
  • Serialization bug fixes
  • ClientCertificate bug fix for Mono
  • And many more bug fixes…

Full release notes are up on GitHub. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty, you can see every commit that made it into this release using the GitHub compare view.

I want to send a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. You should feel proud of your contribution!

Who are you and what did you do to Sheehan?!

Don’t worry! John Sheehan is safe and sound in an undisclosed location. Ha! I kid. I’m beating him senseless every day.

Seriously though, if you use RestSharp, you should buy John Sheehan a beer. Though get in line as Paul Betts owes him at least five beers.

-359John started RestSharp four years ago and has shepherded it well for a very long time. But a while back he decided to focus more on other technologies. Even so, he held on for a long time tending to his baby even amidst a lot of frustrations, until he finally stopped contributing and left it to the community to handle.

And the community did. Various other folks started taking stewardship of the project and it continued along. This is the beauty of open source.

We at GitHub use RestSharp for the GitHub for Windows application. A little while back, I noticed people stopped reviewing and accepting my pull requests. Turns out the project was temporarily abandoned. So Sheehan gave me commit access and I took the helm getting our bug fixes in as well as reviewing and accepting the many dormant pull requests. That’s why I’m here.

Why RestSharp when there’s HttpClient?

Very good question! System.Net.HttpClient is only available for .NET 4.5. There’s the Portable Class Library (PCL) version, but that is encumbered by silly platform restrictions. I’ve written before that this is harms .NET. I am hopeful they will eventually change it.

RestSharp is unencumbered by platform restrictions - another beautiful thing about open source.

So until Microsoft fixes the licensing on HttpClient, RestSharp is one of the only options for a portable, multi-platform, unencumbered, fully open source HTTP client you can use in all of your applications today. Want to build the next great iOS app using Xamarin tools? Feel free to use RestSharp. Find a bug in using it on Mono? Send a pull request.

The Future of RestSharp

I’m not going to lie. I’m just providing a temporary foster home for RestSharp. When the HttpClient licensing is fixed, I may switch to that and stop shepherding RestSharp. I fully expect others will come along and take it to the next level. Of course it really depends on the feature set it supplies and whether they open source it.

As they say, open source is about scratching an itch. Right now, I’m scratching the “we need fixes in RestSharp” itch. When I no longer have that itch, I’ll hand it off to the next person who has the itch.

But while I’m here, I’m going to fix things up and make them better.