Download Web Content via HTTP

The System.Net.WebClient class provides most of the functionality you will ever need, as demonstrated in the following example:

string url = "http://www.microsoft.com";
string outputfile = "temp.html";

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
    //could also do: byte[] bytes = client.DownloadData(url);
    try
    {
        client.DownloadFile(url, outputfile);
    }
    catch (WebException ex)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
    }
}

This is very easy to do, but DownloadFile is a synchronous method, which means it will wait until the file is done before returning. This isn’t great if you want to allow the user to do other things in the meanwhile (or to be able to cancel the transfer).