Programmatically logging into a site

Question

It might sound silly; but can we programmatically login into a site such as Linkedin by passing our user credentials (userid and password)? I am not talking about using OAuth or

Answer 1

Yes, you could use a HttpWebRequest in order to send HTTP requests to a given URL. So the idea would be to POST your credentials to the given url which is supposed to authenticate the user and capture any cookies that could be used on subsequent requests to authenticated parts of the site.

Of course that's pretty raw work, if the remote site provides an API you might also use this API as it will simplify things.