implementing async/await in .NET Core when calling external APIs
I'm confused about I'm optimizing some code but I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm currently working on a .NET Core 5 application and I've run into a question with asynchronous calls when fetching data from an external API. I have a method that calls an API and processes the response, but I am experiencing unexpected behavior where the results sometimes come back as null, or the response takes significantly longer than expected. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```csharp public async Task<MyResponse> GetApiDataAsync(string endpoint) { using (var client = new HttpClient()) { client.Timeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10); var response = await client.GetAsync(endpoint); response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode(); var jsonString = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<MyResponse>(jsonString); } } ``` I call this method from another async method like this: ```csharp public async Task ProcessDataAsync() { var data = await GetApiDataAsync("https://api.example.com/data"); if (data == null) { // Log an behavior or handle the null case Console.WriteLine("Received null response"); } else { // Process the data } } ``` I've noticed that if the external service is under heavy load, I sometimes get a timeout exception or the response doesn’t serialize correctly, leading to a null object. I tried increasing the timeout, but that doesn’t seem to help. I also checked the API endpoint manually and it returns valid JSON responses, so it seems to be a question with how I'm handling it. I have tried adding try-catch blocks around the API call, but it still doesn't catch cases where the response is valid yet deserializes to null. Is there a better way to ensure that the deserialization is robust? Are there any best practices for handling async calls in .NET Core that might prevent these issues? Also, how can I improve the reliability of my external API calls? My development environment is Windows. Am I missing something obvious? This issue appeared after updating to Csharp stable. Any feedback is welcome! What's the correct way to implement this?