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

When it comes to POSTing data to a web site, System.Net.HttpWebRequest (the HTTP-specific implementation of WebRequest) is a perfectly decent solution. It supports SSL, async requests and a bunch of other goodies, and is well-documented on MSDN.

The payload can be anything: data in JSON format or whatever -- as long as you set the ContentType property to something the server expects and understands (most likely application/json, text/json or text/x-json), all will be fine.

One potential issue when using HttpWebRequest from a system service: since it uses the IE proxy and credential information, default behavior may be a bit strange when running as the LOCALSYSTEM user (or basically any account that doesn't log on interactively on a regular basis). Setting the Proxy and Authentication properties to Nothing (or, as you C# folks prefer to call it, null, I guess) should avoid that.