System.Net.WebRequest

If you need your application to access the internet, but you are behind a proxy server or want to change the way pages you request are cached, this is the article for you!
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About System.Net.WebRequest

The System.Net.WebRequest class handles any HTTP or HTTPS requests that your application makes. By default, it uses the Internet Explorer proxy settings and will used a cached copy of a page (subject to the age of the page) instead of requesting the page from the server.

If you find you need to change the caching policy or configure a proxy manually, you will need to use the following code:

Firstly lets add the using statements for the namespaces that contain the classes we need to use.

using System.Net;
using System.Net.Cache;

If you are behind a proxy server, configure the proxy details first.

/* Instantiate a WebProxy object and configure it with the server's IP Address.
You can specify a port for the proxy server by putting :8080 or whatever the port number is at the end of the IP address. e.g. 192.168.1.10:8080 */
WebProxy proxy = new WebProxy("192.168.1.10");

/* If your Proxy server requires authentication, set the credentials you want to use to authenticate. */
proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("User", "Password", "Domain");

If you want to modify the Caching policy, then you need to set the DefaultCachePolicy property.

/* Set the DefaultCachePolicy for WebRequests.
In this example I have chosen to bypass the cache so every request goes directly to the source page, however this can be changed by choosing a different RequestCacheLevel. */
WebRequest.DefaultCachePolicy = new RequestCachePolicy(RequestCacheLevel.BypassCache);

If you configured a WebProxy, set it as the default proxy to be used by the WebRequest class.

// Set the proxy used by the WebRequest class.
WebRequest.DefaultWebProxy = proxy;

This article was published on the 24th December 2007