Raise exception if HTTP response is other than Success

The standard way nowadays to perform a HTTP request in .NET is using the HttpClient object in the System.Net.Http namespace. There are other objects with a similar purpose, such as HttpWebRequest but HttpClient has probably become the most common.

The HttpClient has a range of methods, such as GetAsync or PostAsync that return an object of type HttpResponseMessage – or to be exact a Task of HttpResponseMessage as they are asynchronous methods that can be awaited.

The HttpResponseMessage has quite a handy method called EnsureSuccessStatusCode. It raises an exception if the HTTP response code was something else than Success. Therefore if you need to immediately know that there was a problem with a HTTP response then this method is a quick way to show that. Its usage is simple:

HttpClient client = new HttpClient()
{
	BaseAddress = "http://www.myapi.com/"
};
HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync("customers");
response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();

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