Asynchronous Webrequest best practices

Question

What is the best practice for getting a webrequest asynchronously?

I want to download a page from the internet (doesn't matter what) and avoid blocking a thread as much as possible.

Previously I believed that it was enough to just use the 'BeginGetResponse' and 'EndGetResponse' pair. But on closer inspection I also see that there is the option of using 'BeginGetRequestStream'

[UPDATE] GetRequestStream is used for POST operations

And then to add to the confusion, Should I be using stream.BeginRead and EndRead?

[UPDATE] this article suggests it is even better to process the HttpResponse.GetResponseStream asynchronously using Stream.BeginRead

What a mess!

Can someone point me in the right direction?

What is the Best Practice?

Answer 1

You could code this all yourself or you could just use WebClient which does a lot of the grunt work for you. For example, to download file as a string you would call DownloadStringAsync() which eventually will trigger the OnDowloadStringCompleted event. If the file is binary you might try using DownloadDataAsync() instead.