A first question would be - why create another factory for HttpClient if Microsoft have already created an excellent library in Microsoft.Http.Extensions?
(take a look at this documentation article to learn more)
Microsoft's factory works and works well, but it has two drawbacks, in my case those weren't something I could work around.
First, it is tightly coupled to Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection package, which in absence of ASP.Net Core or .Net Core hosted service is not viable to use. Yes, I could initialize the dependency injection and configure it, but the resulting code was ugly and not elegant.
Second issue is package versions. I was unable to use Microsoft's HttpClient factory in projects that depended on an old version of Microsoft.Http.Extensions - in those projects I couldn't change the dependency versions, so unfortunately it was a no-go.
The HttpClientFactory is lightweight, with minimal dependencies and properly handles a well-known issue of HttpClient - respecting DNS changes.
(if you are unsure what do I mean by this, there is a really awesome blogpost, it explains the issue in-depth)
Also, the factory incorporates support for Polly policies, as can be seen in the code sample below.
Using the client factory is simple, and pretty self-explanatory. Here is how HttpClient that supports HTTPS and has a retry policy on transient exceptions.
public HttpClient CreateClient() =>
HttpClientFactory.Create()
.WithCertificate(DefaultDevCert.Get()) // configure with one or more X509Certificate2 instances
.WithPolicy(Policy<HttpResponseMessage>.Handle<HttpRequestException>()
.OrResult(result => result.StatusCode >= HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError || result.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.RequestTimeout)
.WaitAndRetryAsync(3, retryAttempt => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)))
.Build();