Xamarin Forms PCL - clean and easy way for a webrequest?

Question

I am building an Android/iOS xamarin forms app with a portable class library. I am looking for the best way to do this example inside the PCL project:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/456dfw4f(v=vs.110).aspx

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

namespace Examples.System.Net
{
    public class WebRequestGetExample
    {
        public static void Main ()
        {
            // Create a request for the URL. 
            WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create (
              "http://www.contoso.com/default.html");
            // If required by the server, set the credentials.
            request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
            // Get the response.
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse ();
            // Display the status.
           Console.WriteLine(((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusDescription);
            // Get the stream containing content returned by the server.
            Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream ();
            // Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (dataStream);
            // Read the content.
            string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd ();
            //do something with the response string

            // Clean up the streams and the response.
            reader.Close ();
            response.Close ();
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Just use this NuGet package instead https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Net.Http PCL http request is implemented in it plus it supports async.

EDIT Sample produly stollen from the Hansleman's web-site.

public static async Task<HttpResponseMessage> GetTheGoodStuff() 
{
    var httpClient = new HttpClient();
    HttpRequestMessage request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, "http://hanselman.com/blog/");
    var response = await httpClient.SendAsync(request);
    return response;
}

Answer 2

Flurl.Http (disclaimer: I'm the author) is a Xamarin-compatible PCL that makes this sort of thing really easy:

string s = await "http://www.contoso.com/default.html".GetStringAsync();

Get it on NuGet.