I use C# for scraping. See the helpful HtmlAgilityPack package.
For parsing pages, I either use XPATH or regular expressions. .NET can also easily handle cookies if you need that.
I've written a small class that wraps all the details of creating a WebRequest, sending it, waiting for a response, saving the cookies, handling network errors and retransmitting, etc. - the end result is that for most situations I can just call "GetRequest\PostRequest" and get an HtmlDocument back.
