.NET: Check URL's response status code?

Question

What\'s the easiest way in .NET to check what status code a web server replies with to a GET request?

Note that I do not need the body of the response. In fact, if possi

Answer 1

Here is what I came up with that handles 404 exceptions. There is also a test below.

public static HttpStatusCode GetUrlStatus(string url, string userAgent)
{
    HttpStatusCode result = default(HttpStatusCode);

    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    request.UserAgent = userAgent;
    request.Method = "HEAD";

    try
    {
        using (var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
        {
            if (response != null)
            {
                result = response.StatusCode;
                response.Close();
            }
        }
    }
    catch (WebException we)
    {
        result = ((HttpWebResponse)we.Response).StatusCode;
    }

    return result;
}


[Test]
public void PageNotFoundShouldReturn404()
{
    //Arrange
    HttpStatusCode expected = HttpStatusCode.NotFound;
    string userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36";

    //Act
    HttpStatusCode result = WebHelper.GetUrlStatus("http://www.kellermansoftware.com/SomePageThatDoesNotExist", userAgent);

    //Assert
    Assert.AreEqual(expected, result);
}