Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework (Core Reference)

Using the WebRequest and WebResponse Classes

The WebRequest and WebResponse classes, defined in the System.Net namespace, allow you to retrieve information from the Internet. For example, you can request an HTML Web page that would normally be displayed in a Web browser. You can then process the resulting page programmatically to extract information. This technique of screen scraping is useful, but your application will continue to work reliably only as long as the format of the page does not change excessively. The action of a WebRequest can go beyond simply fetching a page, however. It is possible to send data to the Web server to be processed by programs running on the Web server, such as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script. The response ...