PowerShell, Web Requests, and Proxies

Question

When making a simple web request is there a way to tell the PowerShell environment to just use your Internet Explorer's proxy settings?

My proxy settings are controlled by a network policy(or script) and I don't want to have to modify ps scripts later on if I don't have to.

UPDATE: Great info from the participants. The final script template that I'll use for this will look something like the following:

$proxyAddr = (get-itemproperty 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings').ProxyServer $proxy = new-object System.Net.WebProxy $proxy.Address = $proxyAddr $proxy.useDefaultCredentials = $true  $url = "http://stackoverflow.com" $wc = new-object system.net.WebClient $wc.proxy = $proxy $webpage = $wc.DownloadData($url) $str = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($webpage) Write-Host $str 

Answer 1

Untested:

$user = $env:username $webproxy = (get-itemproperty 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings').ProxyServer $pwd = Read-Host "Password?" -assecurestring  $proxy = new-object System.Net.WebProxy $proxy.Address = $webproxy $account = new-object System.Net.NetworkCredential($user,[Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::PtrToStringAuto([Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::SecureStringToBSTR($pwd)), "") $proxy.credentials = $account  $url = "http://stackoverflow.com" $wc = new-object system.net.WebClient $wc.proxy = $proxy $webpage = $wc.DownloadData($url) $string = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString($webpage) 

...

Answer 2

Somewhat better is the following, which handles auto-detected proxies as well:

$proxy = [System.Net.WebRequest]::GetSystemWebProxy() $proxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials  $wc = new-object system.net.WebClient $wc.proxy = $proxy $webpage = $wc.DownloadData($url) 

(edit) Further to the above, this definition appears to work fine for me, too:

function Get-Webclient {     $wc = New-Object Net.WebClient     $wc.UseDefaultCredentials = $true     $wc.Proxy.Credentials = $wc.Credentials     $wc }