Skip to main content

Bare metal HTTP

Image
By
This time I’ll show you how to create a simple console app that requests resources over the internet using the lowest level APIs (at least the lowest level available in .NET).

The whole point of this post is to prove that there is no magic behind entering a URL in the web browser and get a web page out of that.

This little app requests a webpage and prints out the response to the console. If you want, you can extend it to save the content to a local file and then show it up in the web browser or whatever. (Maybe I'll do that in a future post).

Here I’m using IP and TCP (Network and Transport protocol respectively) to connect the app to the web site, send a request and get a response. The code is self-descriptive but as usual if you have any doubt feel free to contact me.

(For the sake of simplicity, I'm not handling exceptions nor writing single responsibility methods and stuff like that).



If you are interested in learn more about http and how the web works, I highly recommend to take a look at this series by Scott Allen:

http://odetocode.com/Articles/741.aspx
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Migrating an ASP.NET MVC 4 app from Azure websites to WinHost

By
About a week ago I've to migrate an ASP.NET MVC 4/EF5 application from Azure websites to WinHost. While the process was really smooth, there were some caveats related to database connections that I want to share with you. Create and setup the ftp profile on VS and configure the connection string was really easy, WinHost provide you those values and there is nothing special here. But once you deploy your website and try to see it online, you may get the “yellow screen of dead” with the message: "A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)" Assuming you wrote the connection string properly, this happens because you cannot use the default connection name in your web.c...
2 comments
Read more

How to show excel files inside the .NET Webbrowser Control

By
If you are reading this, chances are you been banging your head against the wall for a couple of hours (or even days) trying to show excel files inside the WinForms webbrowser control. Possible reasons you ended up in here: You had working code that got broke after upgrading from Win 7. Your code doesn’t work the same way between machines running different (newer) versions of IE. A download box pops up every time your app tries to show an excel file inside the webbrowser control (you wanna show the actual content). You just have no clue on how to get excel working into the .NET embedded webbrowser control. You are trying to implement IInternetSecurityManager and don’t know where to start. (Or how don’t know how to delegate calls to your security manager). Among many other, maybe….. Yes, COM is a PITA, so is ActiveX and IE (Embedded or full for that matter). And no, showing excel files inside the webbrowser control shouldn’t be that hard, but sometimes we have...
3 comments
Read more

How to replace text with images on Word documents using C#

By
This post it’s a reply to a question I got from a previous post that shows how to work with Word templates from C# code . If you haven’t read it, I recommend to do so because I’m not going into details here. But basically it was about how to create a Word document from a template and perform same text manipulation. So, the question from Marcel Kieboom  was “Do you know if it would be also possible to replace one of the words with an image which is locally stored?” The answer is yes, and this is how you can do that. Based on the same convention I had used in the previous post, I should have a template like this: What I’m trying to do here is replace the text [angus-young] for an actual pic of Angus. The technique I’m using it’s pretty common on web sites and basically consist in have an image with a matching name for each keyword I want to replace and then create the image path dynamically. This is the C# code to do that. * When I execute t...
19 comments
Read more