Is WebRequest The Right C# Tool For Interacting With Websites?

Question

I\'m writing a small tool in C# which will need to send and receive data to/from a website using POST and json formatting. I\'ve never done anything like this before in C#

Answer 1

WebClient is sometimes easier to use than WebRequest. You may want to take a look at it.

For JSON deserialization you are going to want to look at the JavaScriptSerializer class.

WebClient example:

using (WebClient client = new WebClient ())
{
    //manipulate request headers (optional)
    client.Headers.Add (HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");

    //execute request and read response as string to console
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(client.OpenRead(targetUri)))
    {
        string s = reader.ReadToEnd ();
        Console.WriteLine (s);
    }
}

Marked as wiki in case someone wants to update the code