ModernHttpClient and 'Type HttpClientHandler defined in unreferenced assembly' error

ModernHttpClient is a great wrapper around native HTTP clients offered by Xamarin. It wraps NSURLSession on iOS and OkHttp on Android. As it deals pretty well with SSL/TLS stack (especially in uncommon scenarios) it’s often used instead of built-in types. I switched to ModernHttpClient because of weird errors on connections to the preproduction environment in Android.

One disadvantage of using this library is that it’s not actively maintained (last update in repo was from Jan 2016). There are few annoying bugs that have not been (and probably won’t be) fixed. Because of one of them I was forced to customize the Android client a little bit. The result was the unusual reference to the NativeMessageHandler in iOS project. Locally everything was working fine but on the build machine the following error appeared (in the native iOS project):

error CS0012: The type `System.Net.Http.HttpClientHandler' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. Consider adding a reference to assembly `System.Net.Http, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'

This error seemed to be similar to the one described on SO. The suggested solution was to re-create the entire solution from bare template. Obviously I’m not a big fan of such methods.

After trying to add few NuGets which seemed natural (System.Net.Http, System.Net.Primitives) I figured out that this was not the case. Libs from these packages were not those referenced by ModernHttpHandler. Good IDE, such as JetBrains Rider, with decompiler integrated with the smart navigation can be really helpful in such investigations.

The solution was adding reference to System.Net.Http assembly from standard Mono libs directly in iOS csproj file:

<Reference Include="System.Net.Http" />

Happy coding!