Acessing a url from windows application

Question

Hi,

Does anyone know how to acess a url from a windows application?.

I have an address http://serverport/Page.I want to acess this page from my windows application.

Regards, Harsh Suman

Answer 1

It's not clear what you want to do with the page.

If you want to display it on the form, you can use a WebBrowser control.

If you want to get the response and process it, use the System.Net.WebClient class.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you're asking for,so I just give the answer to yet another way to interpret the question.

If you simply want to launch the default browser (to display a local or online html manual etc.), in windows (and probably similar in other OS'es) you can use some kind of "execute interface" to execute a correctly formatted url as the command, this will usually launch the default browser:

According to this page this code should launch a browser:

string targeturl= "http://stackoverflow.com";

try
    {
     System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(targeturl);
    }
catch
    ( 
     System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception noBrowser) 
    {
     if (noBrowser.ErrorCode==-2147467259)
      MessageBox.Show(noBrowser.Message);
    }
catch (System.Exception other)
    {
      MessageBox.Show(other.Message);
    }

(It looks pretty ugly with magic numbers for error codes, though...)

Answer 3

If you want to download an HTML or any file you can use the WebClient class.

Example:

    /// <summary>
    /// Downloads a file from the given location
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="url">Location of the file</param>
    /// <param name="dest">The destination of the downloaded file</param>
    /// <returns>False if there was an error, else True</returns>
    public bool DownLoad(string url, string dest)
    {
        WebClient client = new WebClient();
        try
        {
            //Downloads the file from the given url to the given destination       
            client.DownloadFile(url, dest);
            return true;
        }
        catch (WebException)
        {
            // Handle exception
            return false;
        }
        catch (System.Security.SecurityException)
        {
            // Handle exception
            return false;
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            // Handle exception
            return false;
        }
    }