A better way to validate URL in C# than try-catch?

Question

I\'m building an application to retrieve an image from internet. Even though it works fine, it is slow (on wrong given URL) when using try-catch statements in the applicatio

Answer 1

Or this source code good image valid optimization:

 public static string ValidateImage(string absoluteUrl,string defaultUrl)
        { 
           Uri myUri=null; 
           if (Uri.TryCreate(absoluteUrl, UriKind.Absolute, out myUri))
            {
                using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
                {
                    try
                    {
                        using (Stream stream = client.OpenRead(myUri))
                        {
                            Image image = Image.FromStream(stream);
                            return (image != null) ? absoluteUrl : defaultUrl;
                        }
                    }
                    catch (ArgumentException)
                    {
                        return defaultUrl;
                    }
                    catch (WebException)
                    {
                        return defaultUrl;
                    }
                }
            }
            else
            {
                return defaultUrl;
            }
        }

Sou and demo asp.net mvc source image created: