At the heart of my Brick Manager app is communication with the BrickSet web services. As I started using the service, I wanted to take advantage of HttpClient and the async keyword, but I ran into two challenges up front: (1) Huw uses ASMX for his web service (good luck finding a blog or StackOverflow article discussing how to wire up against one of those) and (2) the site only returns XML (while most Windows/HttpClient blogs only talk about wiring up JSON).