Write today's APOD title to the console

This is a very basic example that will write the title of today's Astronomy Picture of the Day to the console window.

This example targets .NET Core 3.0 but will work with any platform version that supports .NET Standard 2.0 (small changes may be required for different target frameworks).

Creating the project

Start by creating a .NET Core (or .NET framework) Console App. Read this quickstart guide if you are unsure how to do this.

Installing APOD.Net

There are multiple ways of installing a NuGet package. See Adding APOD.Net to your project in the README for other examples.

1. Open your new project in Visual Studio and open the Package Manager Console (Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console).
2. In the Package Manager Console window, write the following command to add the latest version of APOD.Net to your project.

   Install-Package APOD.Net
   

Once the install finishes you are ready to start using APOD.Net.

Implementation

Setup

To get started with APOD.Net and to verify the installation, add the using directive for the Apod namespace in your Program.cs.

using Apod;

If you get errors, run dotnet restore, restart visual studio and try again. If it still doesn't work, feel free to open an issue.

Since APOD.Net is an asynchronous library we are going to make our Main() method asynchronous, which is a language feature from C# 7.1. If you don't have access to C# 7.1, read this article for workarounds.

using System;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Apod;

namespace Example
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static async Task Main()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

Note that we added another using directive for System.Threading.Tasks.

Making the request

The first thing we need is a new instance of an ApodClient. We initialize it with our API key in our Main() method

public static async Task Main()
{
    using var client = new ApodClient("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE");
}

To get today's APOD, we want to use FetchApodAsync() and save the response.

public static async Task Main()
{
    using var client = new ApodClient("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE");
    var response = client.FetchApodAsync();
}

Error handling

Now we need to make sure that there were no errors with the request, which we can do with the StatusCode. If an error did occur, we want to write it to the console.

public static async Task Main()
{
    using var client = new ApodClient("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE");
    var response = await client.FetchApodAsync();

    if (response.StatusCode != ApodStatusCode.OK)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorCode);
        Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorMessage);
        return;
    }
}

Reading the response

Now we can safely read the Content and write the Title to the console. We'll also add Console.ReadLine() to the end of the program so the console window stays open instead of instantly closing as the program terminates.

public static async Task Main()
{
    using var client = new ApodClient("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE");
    var response = await client.FetchApodAsync();

    if (response.StatusCode != ApodStatusCode.OK)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorCode);
        Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorMessage);
        return;
    }

    Console.WriteLine(response.Content.Title);
    Console.ReadLine();
}

And we're done! This program will write the title of today's APOD to the console and wait for you to press the Enter key before terminating.

There are many more properties in the ApodContent that you can use, for example ContentUrl, Explanation and Date to name a few.

Full example code

using System;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Apod;

namespace Example
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static async Task Main()
        {
            using var client = new ApodClient("YOUR_API_KEY_HERE");
            var response = await client.FetchApodAsync();

            if (response.StatusCode != ApodStatusCode.OK)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorCode);
                Console.WriteLine(response.Error.ErrorMessage);
                return;
            }

            Console.WriteLine(response.Content.Title);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}