How to read an ASP.NET internal server error description with .NET?

Question

Behold the code:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    try
    {
        var bytesReceived = client.UploadData("http://localhost", bytesToPost);
        var response = client.Encoding.GetString(bytesReceived);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
    }
}

I am getting this HTTP 500 internal server error when the UploadData method is called. But I can't see the error description anywhere in the "ex" object while debugging. How do I rewrite this code so I can read the error description?

Answer 1

Web servers often return an error page with more details (either HTML or plain text depending on the server). You can grab this by catching WebException and reading the response stream from its Response property.