Why does HttpWebRequest throw an exception instead returning HttpStatusCode.NotFound?

Question

I\'m trying to verify the existence of a Url using HttpWebRequest. I found a few examples that do basically this:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)Ht         


        

Answer 1

Ya this can be quite annoying when web pages use status codes heavily and not all of them are errors. Which can make processing the body quite a pain. Personally I use this extension method for getting the response.

public static class HttpWebResponseExt
{
    public static HttpWebResponse GetResponseNoException(this HttpWebRequest req)
    {
        try
        {
            return (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
        }
        catch (WebException we)
        {
            var resp = we.Response as HttpWebResponse;
            if (resp == null)
                throw;
            return resp;
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Why not? They're both valid design options, and HttpWebRequest was just designed to work this way.