When or if to Dispose HttpResponseMessage when calling ReadAsStreamAsync?

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So it seems like the calling code needs to know about and take
ownership of the response message as well as the stream, or I leave
the response message undisposed and let the finalizer deal with it.
Neither option feels right.

In this specific case, there are no finalizers. Neither HttpResponseMessage or HttpRequestMessage implement a finalizer (and that’s a good thing!). If you don’t dispose of either of them, they will get garbage collected once the GC kicks in, and the handle to their underlying streams will be collected once that happens.

As long as you’re using these objects, don’t dispose. Once done, dispose of them. Instead of wrapping them in a using statement, you can always explicitly call Dispose once you’re done. Either way the consuming code doesn’t need to have any knowledge underlying http requests.

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