How do I Create an HTTP Request Manually in .Net?

Question

I\'d like to create my own custom HTTP requests. The WebClient class is very cool, but it creates the HTTP requests automatically. I\'m thinking I need to create a network

Answer 1

To really understand the internals of the HTTP protocol you could use TcpClient class:

using (var client = new TcpClient("www.google.com", 80))
{
    using (var stream = client.GetStream())
    using (var writer = new StreamWriter(stream))
    using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
    {
        writer.AutoFlush = true;
        // Send request headers
        writer.WriteLine("GET / HTTP/1.1");
        writer.WriteLine("Host: www.google.com:80");
        writer.WriteLine("Connection: close");
        writer.WriteLine();
        writer.WriteLine();

        // Read the response from server
        Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
    }
}

Another possibility is to activate tracing by putting the following into your app.config and just use WebClient to perform an HTTP request:

Then you can perform an HTTP call:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    var result = client.DownloadString("http://www.google.com");
}

And finally analyze the network traffic in the generated network.log file. WebClient will also follow HTTP redirects.