• 01/18/2009
•   WinForms

Sometimes a desktop application might need to download a web page to be displayed to the user or screen scrapped. I did this in my MoviePlay application to get the IMDb (The Internet Movie Database) page of the movie. To accomplish this include first the System.IO and System.Net namespaces:

using System.IO;             //for StreamReader
using System.Net;            //for WebClient

The following code needs 3 controls to work; a TextBox (textBox1), a Button (button1), and a WebBrowser (webBrowser1).

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{               
    string URL = "http://amgadhs.com/";
    WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
                
    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(webClient.OpenRead(URL));
    
    //pageContent will contain raw HTML
    string pageContents = sr.ReadToEnd();

    //display the HTML in a TextBox
    textBox1.Text = pageContents;

    //display the page in a WebBrowser control
    webBrowser1.DocumentText = pageContents;
}