HttpUtility.UrlEncode in Windows Phone 7?

Question

The regular .Net framework contains HttpUtility.UrlEncode in the System.Web Assembly and in Silverlight it appears it was moved to System.Windows.Browser. But in Windows Phone 7 (which I thought was the same as Silverlight) I can't seem to find a proper way to UrlEncode anything. Neither of the previously mentioned assemblies are available in the Windows Phone 7 environment.

Answer 1

Silverlight has the Uri.EscapeUriString and Uri.EscapeDataString which can be used to URL-encode portions of a URI such as query strings and path components and such.

Even in the desktop framework, you should never take a dependency on System.Web.dll just for HttpUtility, although many developers still do it. This is bad for 3 reasons.

• The assembly is very large and loading it can add significant delays to your application.
• You will be bloating the working set of your process for about 20 lines of code.
• It makes your application require the full framework since System.Web is not in the client profile.

In addition to the Uri escaping methods described above, if you need HtmlEncode, I would just rip code off that someone else wrote and drop it in your application.